Full Scale 3d City (Work in Progress Stills)
I lead a team of artists to help me build this beast of a city. Its purpose was to provide coverage for any shot and camera move the clients threw at us. From All CG shots to set extensions to backgrounds, this environment was a huge accomplishment. It was set up for both daytime and nighttime shots. Both lighting scenarios equipped with complete Global Illumination. Thousands of physical lights producing a fully GI lit nighttime set.
-The set is 10x10 miles with suburbs and mountains on the outskirts.
-This was a 6 month process.
-There are roughly 20,000 lights in this scene.
-The buildings are a mix of in-house modeling, purchased assets, repurposed assets, and shared assets from the sister studio.
-The hero buildings (which are actual Downtown LA buildings) are equipped with interior walls and physical lights. The window blinds helped given realism to the lighting break up. We placed rows of lights in the hallways and left the doors opened, which made a cool falloff effect.
I wanted the nighttime city to have an electric feel. So in some shots we boosted the ground/street lights to make it look like those cool long-exposure city photos.
Something I realized early on was the importance of rooftop details. It helped sell the scale, provide a ton of detail, and added variety and life to the environment.
Varying tones and colors for the interior lights added great visual noise, realism, and spice. Some lights were placed inside the rooms, and some were placed in the hallways. I wish we could have done all of our buildings like this but there wasn't time.
The street lights actually provided the most lighting to the scene. Couldn't be done without GI. I thought about how in the real world these lights bounce off the ground and create a gradient-like falloff of the city lights on buildings.
In the early stages of building the city. This is where we knew no matter how much you vary the look on the self illuminated windows, it still looks bad.
Thousands of homes, buildings, strip malls. All CG. 100 Square miles. Some meticulously hand placed, some Forest Pack driven. It's a miracle 3d Max handled the scene at all.
Only the road and vehicles here are from plate footage.
A decent bump map for the tiles provided nice angulation and breakup of reflections.
