City at Night

Artwork Works in Progress
1

I’m not realy sure where to post this(or if to post it at all) as its not realy finished, but i probably won’t ever do any more significant changes to it.

I’l put it here for now, and if i don’t do anything with it, i’l put it in the finished projects.

It started life as a test of the nodes in blender, i hadn’t done anything with them till now, and then expanded from there. I just used the blur nodes with rgb curves to get the bright parts of the render(the tower on a plane) to glow(initialy the red bits on the tower). I won’t bother posting the nodes setup, as its extreemly messy(i experimented with other things as well).

After that i was bored, so i added some spotlights, then some very simple high rises, then a whole lot more highrises, then the moon and the water. I still havn’t bothered doing any details on it, so its a very stylised pic. There are no textures apart from the moon and the waters displacement/normal maps. The buildings are just cubes at various heights, with 10% of their windows(a mesh of seperate rectangle faces around the cubes) lit.

So, anyway, heres the pic. Like i said, there is a lot more to put in it, even without adding detail. C&C would be apreciated on things like lighting, composition(not that i did any, its centered:), that will come with the major additions, if they ever come), and the glow effect, and you may even get those additions some day.

—Shamem

edit: as you can see, there are currently no stars in the sky. this is because i am having a hard time finding a style of stars that looks alright with it. i am working on it, but if anyone can provide a star map or a way of making one that looks good with the pic, it would be much apreciated.

Attachments

tower full res.jpg1024×576 60.5 KB

2

The waves are way too huge for it to be a city, they’re more like swells. Try and make the water texture really tiny and detailed.

3

The waves are way to huge. I’ve done a quick resize on them and attached the render, but i personaly prefer the pic with the origonal size waves. Its not like any of the rest of it is realistic anyway :D.

Attachments

tower full res-small waves1.jpg1024×576 57.9 KB

4

The second one looks much better with that adjustment! I was thinking make the windows a little more regular, perhaps smaller as well.

It looks pretty good, though the single building sticking three times the height of all the other buildings is a tad disconcerting… :stuck_out_tongue: That and the lack of cars, or bridges…

Nice work,
-albert

5

zog34: thanks. This pic is realy the background to the main part of the pic, which i havn’t modeld and probably won’t get around to modeling, but if i ever do “finish”, the size of the tower will hopefully make more sence.

I most likely won’t add any cars, i don’t even have proper streets in it at the moment, just gaps in the buildings, that you can’t even see properly from this angle. I may add a few details to the waterfront, definatly no bridges. This can also be explained by the backstory to the full pic. Very conveniant ay:).

The highest of the main buildings(not including the scatterd ones that are 2x and 3x the height) are 18 stories high, based on windows. That makes the tower about 99 stories high(red bits beside the blue at the top are the tip of the tower. The blue is just a light beam). this is actualy shorter than i wanted, so i may redo the city with more and smaller windows. it only took me about an hour to do the city initialy, so its not that hard.

What do mean by “make the windows a little more regular” btw?

—Shamem

6

[edit]The windows you have are too consistantly random. If that makes any sense at all…[/edit]

Erm… If you look at almost (The EXP does not count) any building that has windows in large amounts they are usually regularly spaced in a grid format. Hope that helps some.

-albert

7

o, i see what you mean. The windows are regualy spaced and in a gid format, but as its the middle of the night 90% of the lights behind the windows are “turned off”. Or thats the theory anyway. The “buildings” are surrounded by rectangle faces, with an emiting texture, which i then delete 90% of with the very usefull random select tool. If i left them all “on”, from this distance and with the glow effect the entire city would just be a white blob. Its suposed to look something like a styalised version of THIS, but with less lights on.

—Shamem

8

Well, yeah, ok… I see it now… I was just thinking that those buildings were bigger than they are… Thats all. Sorry boot that.
-albert