futuristic city scene
 

Hi guys,

Just thought I'd post some stuff I'm playing with for uni at the minute.
This scene will be a background for a poster that could possibly be used for my final project (not decided on the style etc yet).
It's a very early draft after playing with some geometric shapes and deciding on possible layouts etc.
Next steps are to texture some skyscrapers and some other buildings and design some futuristic hovering craft for the road section (which will be reflective).
Then the difficult task of lighting it in a good way...

http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/test7.jpg

Dude ..this is a great start I'll be watching this one :)

thanks jsprogg :)

here's a slight update messing about with the road surface to get a reflective feel (just placenholders for vehicles right now). I've also removed the blue tone out of the picture for the moment so I can concentrate on the textures before giving it a photoshop 'tint and shine' ;)


http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/test8.jpg

Si

Very Nice Composition

Jay

I love it!

Maybe some nice curved street lights/lamps each side of the road and a pedestrian section on 1 side to help sell the scale a little more?

Keep it comin :beer:

The shaddows need a higher filter number. They're a little pixelly...


I like how the sky isn't a solid color though!! Good reflections! I'm excited for the rest of the picture!

Sparticus

cheers jay, thats the bit I've been spending most of the time on so far :)

thanks tiddles, I like your ideas with showing the scale off more (the skyscraper textures at present are too large so changing them might help). The road network will be pretty much self regulated other than robotic traffic style cones that quickly move in, block accident areas off and remove debris (kind of doing the job of the police, ambulance and fire services all in one). The roads are also pretty much their own separate units because of this and 'generally' no pedestrians will be on the main areas but may be around junction areas where the roads leave and join.
That's not to say the building towards the front right cant have people or items to give a better scale present :)

thanks wasatch5_sparticus, I'm not too worried about the shadow pixellation yet but I've made a note as to what you said so it can be altered later :)

slight update, rescaled and changed the textures on the background buildings and am playing with reflectivity and how it will affect the scene :)

http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/test9.jpg

Si

Scale is much better. Slight changes to texture can sure have a big impact. So, are we gunna get a pic from another angle?
(I wanna see what you got goin on the far right hand side)

wow! this is looking very cool mate - really like some of the reflection that you've got going on - especially on the road- and the composition looks cool too.

this reminds me a bit of that futuristic bridge scene that you did for one of the challenges last year.

looking forward to seeing some updates. :beer:

thanks randy, its going to be a backdrop for a poster I'm working on for a uni project. It's kind of loosely linked in to my final project idea (not futuristic) which will probably start being developed and posted up here in a few months. Cool hover cars are the plan for the road ;) although time may mean that they are fairly simple

you're right there tiddles, playing with the scale has definitely helped - and sorted problems out that could have happened in the future :)
It's primarily composed for this single shot but I'll post up some angles of the build up and how its developing tomorrow

thanks arran :) yeah the reflections are what I'm trying to nail down at the minute. It seems really slow going working lots on the composition and then reflections when I want to dive in and model some new bits ;) It does have some similarities with the old bridge attempt (totally forgot about that till you mentioned it) but this one will be mainly geometry instead of a matte backdrop.

More updates tomorrow
Si

very nice concept man, one thing i noticed was the ahrp edges on the buildings, i think you should bevel them.

thanks younglion :)
yep nothing has had any bevelling yet, the buildings are still more or less placeholders awaiting more detail ;)

Should hopefully be back on this tomorrow to work up the reflections and start getting some textures on the closer buildings

Si

Very impressive work t1ck135! This reminds me of the bridge you were working on for the aug/sept challenge last year if I reccall correctly.

Si

Are you goingto be animating this?

I just thought, if not, why not save yourself the hassle and matte paint it instead of texturing it (painfully)

You can render out shadows, reflection and spec etc and then comp in PS over the textures! Easy

Jay

oh the mind of a lazy professional :)

I would haver never thought of that Jay , what a brilliant solution (no UV mapping).

This scene is awesome.

Hey Si

This is lookig really good so far.

I'm going to be doing some sort of city scape soon so I might be mithering you with some texturing questions (that is if your not going to do what Jay said!

Cheers

Steve

You're off to a great start Si,

you're definately going for the Star Trek style future world rather than the Blade Runner look, a very impressive start.

Take it easy,

Mat.

jsprogg,

LOL, I think its something thats really overlooked, especially if you arent animating a scene of this size. Im busy with this type of work alot now, its a real time saver and the results can be stunning. Its a pity its not as useful for characters though LOL

If it was animated you could still reproject the painting back over it for a minor camera move, if its a big camera move then you could set up multiple projections with 2 or more mattes being projected from different angles. A lot less hassle than uving this lot.

Cheers
Jay

THX1138 - Yeah it has similarities with the bridge piece - must be my liking for scenes with big swooping bridges/roads ;)

Jay - It will be a static shot but it never occurred to me that this would be good for a matte painting. Cheers for pointing that out :) Have you got any examples you've done that we can look at?
Might it be helpful to throw a basic grid texture on the buildings so you know the perspective angles or is that a bit of overkill if it's going to be a background layer in photoshop?
One other thing is - how do you render out just the reflections or shadows? I've heard it mentioned in lots of threads but have never seen ot tried it yet.

Jsprogg - neither would I, its great that professionals like jay are around to offer good advice

Steve - no probs, I might mix and match it a bit to start with till I get into the flow of matte painting (never really done it before but it looks great fun)

happymat27 - thanks :) It is definitely more of a 'utopian' shot. I've got some manga theme and influence running through the idea at present so it'll probably stay fairly clean.

Hey Si

If you want to just render the shadows then have a look at rendering layers, it depends on the version of maya you have but you basically set up layers (like you would for geo but as a render layer) you then add the geo that you want for each layer, (say you were doing a car on a background you would make 2 layers one with the car and one with the background) then you can either (depending on your version of maya) use the flag options (thats in the render layers control) to set what you want to render, beauty, diffuse, colour etc etc for each layer.

I dont think that theres an actual way to just get the reflections without making a 100% reflective material and rendering it as a new layer and then comping this over the top.

Cheers

Steve

Hey Si

Here you go. But this one is purely photoshop, no 3d anywhere.
Basically, I created the flat 2d shapes in PS using say a beige color, but of slighly different tones so I could work out where the light and shads were coming from and then for the textures used the blendmodes in the layers palette (screen, overlay or soft light) until I was happy with the way the texture was sitting, adjust the perspective as needed - Done!

I have got 3d mattes but Im afraid you cant see them until end of May (Outlaws Stuff)

Cheers
Jay

http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/5...uretestdv2.jpg

Heres a quick sample of how I did it. The same principles will apply in 3d but the shadows are done for you obviously. Depending on the texture and the color of the model you will most likely have to adjust certain things like brightness/contrast and even color to get the desired effect

I have some perspective grids if you want me to mail them to you.

Cheers
Jay

http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/1...esamplepa2.jpg

Thanks for the help guys, its definitely appreciated

Steve - thanks for explaning it, that makes it sound a lot simpler than what I had going around in my head ;)

Jay - Nice work on the matte, its good to see how you have broken it down to get the end result. I'm looking forward to seeing the Outlaws work using this techinque. The perspective grids sound like just the thing, I'll pm you my email :)

Si

Si

No probs.

Just read what Steve said about render passes for reflection.

Just last night I fancied watching the making of Star Wars Episode 1 extras (making ofs etc.). In the deleted scenes section they show a waterfall sequence that was deleted from the film but then for about 10 mins show how it was put together. The guy who did it rendered out the submarine separately with a 100% reflective shader and nothing else. He then comped it in after and adjusted the opacity until he was happy with it. So it may help to break down scenes and save them off in pieces for different passes altogether as well.

The guy also show the shot from a completely different camera too, it was a real mess looking at it, but the actual shots were awsome. Oh and just to really piss you off, they used pouring salt for the water falls and shot those on black backgrounds and then comped that into the matte as well, particles were used but very sparingly just to add fluffy bits of spray.....none of this fluid lark, hey ho!! Easy when you know how,

Cheers
Jay

Hey Si

Another thing I do as well as rendering the seppreate passes for the basics (colour, shaddows, specular) ill create new scenes, say with occlusion, reflection and then render the lot using a .bat file that way you can get maya to render sepperate scenes, layers, passes etc that you cant get from the basic layer controls, which when compping gives a lot of control. The downside it that you need the computing power to do it as it tie's up a Pc for a while depending on how complex the scene is.

just got the DVD out and watched that sequence Jay, its great to see exactly how they went about it to get the different results that were needed. I wonder how long it took to get to the final scene ;)

Cheers for the extra tips Steve, it sounds like you've done a fair bit of rendering separate layers in the past :)

I've just had a quick play and got these layers from the settings. It kind of makes more sense then when you take it into photoshop and start playing with the layer settings.
Dont know if they are right though or if I need to play about with excluding things like reflective/refractive things?

shadow (with backdrop left in):
http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/city_shadow.jpg

diffuse:
http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/city_diffuse.jpg

color:
http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/city_color.jpg

specular:
http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/ci...y_specular.jpg

Si

Yup its getting there. I'd really watch that shadow pass, as you've got a very black building on the right there. Perhaps do a different light pass for the shads only so they are coming in from one direction perhaps from the right (just a thought) use raytraced shads with a directional light and try the settings for the shadows on Light Angle 20 and the Shadow Rays at 10 or 15.

It may look better for this with one side of the image slightly in shade too.

Ps. Render a Z depth pass too for distance and fog effect. This will give the whole image more scale. This pass is usually set to multiply in PS and then what I do is invert it.


Cheers
Jay

cheers jay :)
You're really helping me to understand this area of rendering. I guess it'll speed up subsequent work a heck of a lot when its all figured out.
I've just found the presets for the render layers (I'd been manually hacking away at options) and it gives far better results now. I'll try and get some up so you can have a better look. It's shown that the front right building is far too high specularly and like you say there is a building or two with shadow problems.

Si

here's a quick variant to the image after being rendered out in layers and photoshop'ed. Immediately it lets you play with the effects and help spot those problem areas :)

Jay: That building with the shadow/spec issue is still a default lambert shader whereas the rest have a generic shader on so that might be causing the problem.

I'm still not sure about what effects to use for each layer but this is what the following image has (as an experiment):

specular - color dodge
diffuse - soft light
ambient occlusion - normal
background - normal

http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/test1_layers.jpg

Si

Hey Si

glad to help, I think alot of images go by the wayside because people tend not to look at the job after the fact. Boom! one render and its 'next please'. I think its more of a 50/50 option in 3d and 2d to get the best out of it.

the image is looking better, but the specular pass is burning out. Perhaps use a blinn. I find that using a lambert can cause this issue. Theres no spec control at all. Also maybe worth trying to do the specular pass on the model itself so save time in that area.

With regards to layer comping, I found its what works best at the end of the day for you to achieve the desired effect, especially when it comes to layering on textures. Theres a lot of adjustment involved but in this case it sure beats the hell out of 'uv'ing another 'cube' LOL

Edit: Also with regards to spec, (think outside the box here) you may not want all the buildings to be shiny, regardless of being a future city

Cheers for now
Jay

Hi Jay,
hehe, I thought that it WAS mainly bang a render out and then touch it up in photoshop, not to actually take loads of layers and then play to get a nice effect afterwards (which is much better now that I know and have tried ;) ) :beer:

Yeah I really liked the effect of the reflections in the rear central skyscraper and stupidly thought it would look good everywhere (like you say, not all buildings need to be shiny). I've knocked the blinn settings down so hopefully that and maybe not using the color dodge will bring things back down to earth a bit.

here's another play but its mainly getting the specular levels down a bit and slightly moving things around to better draw the view in. Once those bits are finalised then I'll render the relevant layers out and start working things up :)

Si

http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/test2_layers.jpg

Si

Well this looks like the one for me. Just needs fog for depth and scale and a bunch of cool textures and some more detailed cars (LOL)

Good job dude, looking forward to the rest....


Jay

Sorry Si

I forgot to mention Dylan Cole, a very good matte artist, check this lot from Superman Returns http://www.dylancolestudio.com/index2.html

Jay

Busy weekend hance no updates.
I've had a look into depth fog Jay and 'think' I've got it working (lightly applied at the minute):
http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/test3_layers.jpg

That dylan cole stuff is great - he must have a heck of a lot of reference material or just a great creative mind :)

think I need to start on the texturing pretty soon now!

Si

Hey Si

Yeah thats good dude. It will probably need adjusting once the color begins to stamp its authority over the image.

DCs stuff is a bit of everything, reference and his own skills. Its worth getting the Ballistic Publishing book MAtte Painting. Hes a featured artist in it, with probably the best section of the book.

Cheers
Jay

Hi Jay,
Yeah the colour will definitely throw things around :)

I may well start looking into more of this matte painting stuff. That book sounds like it could be a good first step.

here's a quick play with painting some areas in to see what might work where or what wont ;)

http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/test4_layers.jpg

Si

Here's a bit more playing with areas to see what could work.
I'm thinking for the foreground buildings it would probably have been a good idea to model more geometry and texture them and then just touch it up in post. With the mid and background buildings just doing matte painting would be fine :)

If anyone knows where there are highres references of skyscrapers or building textures then let me know - the original size of this is 4000x2500 and I'm having real trouble finding decent textures ;)

This one has the depth fog still in just so it shows a toned down version:
http://www.flash-fx.net/3D/images/city/test5_layers.jpg

Si

yeah - this is shaping up nicely! looking forward to seeing some detail on the vehicles and other stuff going on. :beer:

I'll have a scan around for some textures...

Jay