Coruscant (Star Wars)

Artwork Works in Progress
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Hi,
I’ve been working on a new Star Wars video for my YouTube channel, which will be 100% CG (Blender and Cycles, of course), the first shot is an aerial shot of the planet Coruscant which is basically a giant city. I wanted to emulate stock footage of cities like New York or Shanghai in the camera angle and movement and the framing, so I settled on a slow, smooth movement. The large tower on the left is meant as a focal point.

This took me about 5 hours to create, rendered in Cycles and Post Processing in After Effects.

Rendertimes for 380 Samples + Denoising was ~10 minutes per frame on my laptop (GTX 970M), and 3 minutes per frame on my desktop (GTX 1080Ti).

The models are from Scifi3d.com, which is a great site for models from SciFi series like Star Wars.

I rendered the Volume Pass with Sheepit, I highly recommend it.

Coruscant
Coruscant1920×1080 2.02 MB

19 Likes
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How did you import the buildings into blender when on the website they are all in 3ds max format?

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Just use a converter of your choice… None will do Max files. You need to have a friend or use this site HERE ( NOTE: it will fail or timeout if there is heavy traffic on the site…also there is a size restriction…)

For all other type files, I use Noesis to convert to FBX

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The buildings also have a .3ds extension, which Blender used to support, until support was dropped in 2.8

You can import them using a slightly older version of Blender, I’ve found a quick tutorial on YT for that

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Thanks all, i managed to figure it out. One more question though, for the floor of your scene Erel are those just random blocks or places buldings?

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Also do you mind showing me your texture settup for the buldings?

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There are buildings on the site which are great for the “floor”

As for the texture setup, it’s pretty simple. I’ll look for it tomorrow

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Did you ever find the texture settup?

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This looks great, although my one problem is the diversity of the materials on the building. The modelling is great, but I feel like to give it some life/animation it would be best to add maybe 2 or three different materials, with buildings close to the camera having unique materials. This is just a suggestion though :slight_smile:

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You’re right, this is actually an old render and I never posted the final

So here it is:

1 Like
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I found the file. It’s a bit old, otherwise I’d be using the Principled of course

This is for the buildings themselves

image
image1045×721 162 KB

And this is for the windows

image
image1269×415 75.6 KB

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Thanks for the replies man, this helps a bunch. Also, did you use some kind of effect to place all those building down? It would probably take forever to place them all manually haha.

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I placed them using 3 particle systems
The first is for the ground blocky elements, the second is for the main buildings and the last is for smaller buildings to fill in the empty spaces

There are several thousand buildings :grinning: