City and Cabin Challenge - mockup

Hi. For my ‘City and Village’ competition entry, I chose to use both models supplied, and combine / juxtapose them together into one image. And so we have the organic, natural terrain in the foreground, and then the monotonous, regular city in the background. This I blocked out as a quick sketch in Photoshop. I decided later on to add another focus, so I included a 3d model I have from axyz-design (I needed something red as focus point, and luckily this kid has a red sweater!), a boy staring at his mother, trapped in an office. This model ‘Claudia’ I got from renderpeople.com as part of another rendering competition I entered a few years back. The Evermotion cabin and city models I converted to Standard Materials in 3ds Max, so I could export them as obj format into the Octane Standalone renderer, which I used to render a few lighting passes. The HDRI image used for the Ambient lighting is an old Purelight HDRI which I chose as it’s a nice blue-y dusky image. The osl window box textures worked great for the distant buildings in Octane, but for some reason, I couldn’t get them to work as well with the main mid-ground central tower, so I mapped the original exr’s onto simple geometry in 3ds Max, and included them solely for this ‘hero’ tower model. I also souped-up the exr images used by the osl shaders and my ‘room box’ geometry created in Max, playing with their gamma and colour in Photoshop. As well as ‘Claudia’ I also included a few desk models inside the main hero tower, which I got free from 3DSky.org. The vegetation in the foreground is mostly from the Evermotion Anniversary Cabin scene (the ferns, rocks and twigs). The trees are using a Scots Pine model I have from 3dSky. The ground texture in the foreground is an old RD Texture forest floor, downloaded before they got taken over by Epic (I think). The 32 bit renders were layered up in Photoshop, and then I applied an Arion FX to this combined image, just to give some further HDRI artefacts and colour corrections. Think that’s it, good luck to all! Cheers