This is my first piece for the year, and second year of dabbling with Blender. It’s inspired by a shot from South Korea last year.
The guy is made by HumGen3d, the plants from Botaniq, but everything else I modelled myself. The car is fairly clumsy, but I hope it works enough.
The rain is made via geometry nodes (huge number of instances with camera/water bounds culling), with a water droplet moving through the scene for motion blur. The rain is done in a separate pass and brought in via compositing. I had done an entire separate simulation of water splashes, rendered as impostors, and scattered across the surface of the water, but it just did not show up with the lighting, no matter what I did. Simulating via dynamic paint on the large plane of water would have been prohibitively expensive. I even tried a separate dynamic paint simulation with particles to add as a bump texture to the water, but it didn’t make enough of an impact.
I liked that this allowed for the rain near the top windows, and as it comes down to the street, to pick up the light and make the rain visible. Close to no rain is visible near the surface of the water, which drives me nuts.
There is a huge volume scatter in the atmosphere, and the water has principled volume scatter. I could not for the life of me get the same muddy water, so my rendition looks more still.
There’s a little bit of fake lighting to show what the umbrellas are, and to highlight the guy a little more. Most of the lighting is emission from textures. The image before denoising is noisy as all get out, even up to 8192 samples with loads of bounces. The compositor’s denoiser made a decent plate.
I omitted a bunch of the noisy street wiring and signage, but maybe it makes my scene too clear.
I simplified the skyline out of laziness and to give the guy on the car more focus.
I tried to align some elements to draw the eye down to the guy, and in the end, wanted a traffic light, and that made it even more explicit.
In compositing I bumped up the exposure by 0.4, and added some glare and lens distortion.
I’d be grateful for any feedback on the piece.