Making of "Evening Street" - Tip of the Week

This scene is a third scene from upcoming collection Archexteriors vol. 33 which will include 10 city exteriors for 3ds Max / V-Ray renderer. Scene number 3 is picturing street corner in the evening - the main building is a shopping center surrounded by neighboure office buildings. We used slow shutter / motion blur to achieve impression of moving cars.

The scene in 3ds Max viewport. As you can see, there is an abundance of lights. To achieve realistic look, we lit interiors, car lights, traffic lights, lanterns, signboards, etc.

Overview of the scene - the main building is just a small part of the whole scene, we included many secondary buildings in this scene.

Main building - shopping center.
 

Camera settings. Notice 5-second shutter speed to achieve prominent motion blur. We need that for painting light streaks of passing cars..

We also included several car models in the scene.

Light streaks material - (emmisive)

Do you see these small colorfull worms over street? These are our light streaks. we animate them and capture with slow shutter camera-  the effect is similar to blurred car lights photographed in the night. Above on the right you can see also lantern spotlight settings.

Street lantern - detail

Street lantern - detail

Main Building mesh

Main building - metal frame mesh

Main building - window mesh

Main building - window material

Main building - walls

Main building - walls material

Main building - floors

There are fully modeled escalators on each floor.

We need people for visualization. In this case they are not close to camera, so we could use cut-out 2d people on planes.

Material of cut-out man

Some other vut-out people in the scene

Our street is modular - we separated intersections and straight street meshes.

Intersection material

Street material

Street material was made in Substance Painter with a great detail:

Final intersection material

Substance Painter - intersection layers

Substance layers:

There are dozens of lights in the scene - Vray Light Lister.

We lit not only main building, but also secondary buildings.

Secondary building

Secondary building

Secondary building

These detail meshes on top of one of the secondary buildings are not seen by main camera, but they are here if you would like to take some camera shot over the roof.

The scene is lit by HDRI. Settings above.

Secondary building

Another global light source - VraySun

Render settings

Final render

Thanks for reading!