In late 2021 I was hired by the city of Tel Aviv to create a short video showing the impact the light rail system will have on the city
It took 6 months of hard work and a project folder weighing 269GB
Everything you see here is based off real construction plans, including the style of the street tiles and the size of individual street tiles
I also modelled accurate benches, trash cans, bus stations and other street furniture, to look like the ones actually used by the city.
The tram models are pretty accurate - I consulted with one of the train manufacturers and even scanned the seats on a real Tel Aviv tram so the fabric pattern is accurate for the one interior shot.
As this render shows real locations, the buildings are accurate as well. The ones closer to the camera are modeled by hand, and the ones farther away are a mix of 3d scans and image planes.
The people are a mix of models I bought online, friends I photoscanned and a few specific models I built. For people in the background, I used Ian Hubert’s amazing “crowd generator” particle system.
I even put myself walking my dog there. The dog has over half a million hairs and Blender crashed quite a bit on that shot.
I used Photoshop for some textures, After Effects for compositing, and Premiere for the edit.
When compositing, I generally do color adjustments and add subtle lens flares or fog when needed.
And of course, as usual, I put a ton of easter eggs in the background
In one of the shots, Spiderman can be seen swinging in the background.
In another, a friend who lives in one of the buildings that appear in the video asked me to add his balcony plants
Here are some additional ones:
For instance, these are the stations of the Red Line:
Some other interesting tidbits:
On the first 2 shots, the skyline is an accurate 2027 Tel Aviv Skyline, though it’s missing quite a few towers so in reality it’ll be much denser
Impressive! Must have taken ages to render.
Works really well with static and moving people in the scenes. Just curious, do you have an example of the compositing before and after? thanks for posting
Actually, the rendering wasn’t too bad, it took a few minutes per frame
I generally prefer to render the scene with an alpha background, and then add the background in After Effects (sometimes it’s a solid color or a gradient and other times it’s the HDRI from Blender, just rendered in a different pass). Then I apply a color grading pass and subtle lens flares.
My slight recreations of Ramat Gan for my short are not even close.
I was thinking about Tel Aviv ( and the surrounding Gush Dan ) as a good setting for a crime movie. Though this visualization was to promote railroads. Which would be cool. The ones in Jerusalem are kind of cool. Still, I imagined every shot with rain. Especially now as horev comes there will be plenty of rain. And so think about Tel Aviv based moody crime drama Blender Film. That could be sooo cool.
thanks for posting 
