Cinema4d microcity questions

I been watching this tutorial .

I would like to recreate microcity in Blender.

  • I’ve made object with 2 arrays and particle system but got lost in first half of the video how he arranged smaller objects in the scene. In Cinema there is some fallof scale tool which could in some way represent Blender’s empty. Scaling and translating empty, array gets displaced around. How to randomize it like in the video?
  • In https://youtu.be/RpPCHyjElBk?t=1886 he made siluettes of partial faces of the object. Some faces are darker and some are ligher in various colours. How to achieve that?
  • In https://youtu.be/RpPCHyjElBk?t=2500 he made fog. I have checked mist pass and enhanced it in compositor with color ramp. It represents the city smog. I’ve been trying with volumetric material but I have very slow CPU. How to make that mist is rising from the ground up?
  • He made some glass reflective apsorbtion material. I’ve set mixed 2 glossy materials. Is there a better one? I tried with glass material but in Blender, it does not represent the same material he used.

I placed post here because I would have to make several posts in support sections.

Here are my results: microcity.blend (1.66 MB)


I did some improvements.
Question: if you use glass shader, how to get rid of shadows which are inside the glass?

Also, tell me what you think. Is glare to strong? Lighting ?


This might be usefull for the glass:

Check out the “Ray Depth” part.
Looks nice so far.

Thanks Nooke11. Glass always has more fireflies than glossy. Maybe more sampling should be better.


Very complex glass structures in Cycles require keeping caustics enabled alongside a high min-bounce parameter if you want maximum realism (and something insane like this might actually need hundreds of bounces).

If you don’t mind cheating a bit though (at the cost of some realism), you can use the transmission depth output in the lightpath node to replace the material with diffuse or transparency after so many bounces.

Transmission depth still keeps shadows inside glass


For this scene it might be worth trying to use the “Cycles denoising build”, never used it before though so I can’t tell you how well it works : https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?395313-Experimental-2-77-Cycles-Denoising-build

A few things wrong with your screengrab.

  • Max bounces are way too low, I would start at 100 or even 200 bounces
  • Min bounces are way too low, you might need this at 50 bounces or even 100.
  • Individual lightpath bounce values are way too low (the glossy and transmission bounces at least should match the max bounce parameter).
  • Filter glossy is 0 (for caustic paths, it helps a lot if you have the value at 0.2 or above).
  • The transparency depth is also way too low if you intend to keep the lightpath cheat.
  • You plugged in the transmission depth directly, that means that the basic transparency starts at 1 bounce because the value goes up by one per-bounce (you will want to have a math node in between the lightpath output and the mix set to greater than (so you can specifically specify the number of bounces before transparency starts).

I found the new Multiscatter GGX distribution mode helps quite a bit with glass. (Not sure if it helps with regular glossy or anisotropic, but its there too.) I think I recall seeing something about a change from regular GGX that preserves light bounces internal to the mesh with the glass material. So glass doesn’t darken so much when you use it. However it also seems to increase fireflys in some cases. Yet I’d say to investigate for yourself, along with mixing glass with transparent in ways that have already been discussed.