Venice by Night : a tutorial about lights!

The city lights at night are always fascinating.

So I decided to try to make my own version of the 3D night view of a city, thanks to CityEngine I exported the fantastic model of Venice as OBJ and I imported into 3d studio max.

using a dim light and the engine Vray GI I defined the minimum required light level.

I finally i've solved the lighting from the bottom of the houses with a little trick: I've duplicated the mesh walkpath, which runs around the houses and using a VRayLight with the mesh parameter to indicate that that the light would be produced directly from the mesh.

You can also play with the light parameter "texture" and use some HDRI map to create nice light effect like this one:

...and a little video... (watch in HD!!)