Making of "Sunset in the City" - Tip of the Week

Hi!

This week we are braking down the scene from Archexteriors vol. 33 - a collection of 10 exterior city scenes. We wanted to create evening scene, where sun is setting over scyscrapers and the streets are getting dark. The scene was created in 3ds Max and rendered in V-ray, but we also provide FBX and OBJ version if you want to open it in other software. Of course, with other formats and software you will usually need to make some additional tweaking to materials and camera (if you use different rendering engine). 

This is a final image, straight out of frame buffer.

Wireframe view.

The camera view in 3ds Max viewport.

The overview of the scene - it contains several buildings, it's lit by V-Ray sun and HDRI dome, of course there are many point lights for illuminating the buildings and street.

Street - closer look.

Traffic lights

Traffic lights - wireframe

You will not see the details on this image, I included it to show how multi-object material for traffic lights look like. It contains all submaterials for lighting, signs, metal, etc.

Example of the material of "One Way" sign.

Ground mesh is simple - it contains of a plane for asphalt, and islands for pavement surrounded by curbs. This scheme was used for all ground in the scene.

Asphalt material - materials were prepared mostly in Substance Painter so there is no complicated wiring here, just PBR textures. Fast and easy workflow.

Curb material

Sun settings

V-Ray Light HDRI settings. You can see tiling of ground texture - but since it is quite far from camera and it is seen in certain sharp angle, it is not noticable on final render.

HDRI map settings

V-Ray light lister - as I mentioned before, we placed many lights in buildings interiors to make scene much more believable. thanks to V-ray adaptive lights, even this amount of lighting is totally reliable and can be rendered in decent time.

This is the furthest building. As you can see, we could cut the details for this one.

It has one glossy material on the elevation.

Final render.

Thanks for reading! :)