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!!)

Free 3D model : Coruscant round suburb with tutorial !

Hello everyone, my image of the figth near the Coruscant Senate and the details of the suburbs city has attracted some interest, particularly on the modeling of suburbs that are quite beautiful !

a combination of accurate models and detailed textures can solve the great problem of doing justice to the planet Coruscant.

click here to download the round suburb of cosruscant (Obj + maps)

and if you want professional suburbs, take a look here

Let's start with models: the main buildings can be retrieved for free directly from the great site www.scifi3d.com, these help to define the general structure of the city, the idea is to put them in the background with the exception of a main building (in my case I chose the Senate in the middle); starships, platforms and other could be valuable contributions to the whole scene.

The model of the suburbs has a cylindrical shape like the movie Star Wars Episode 2:

So the first thing to do is to produce a cylinder as close as possible to the original one. I used 3d studio 2010, I defined a cylinder and with some boolean operations I created the "streets" and used the Greeble plugin to increase the number of details

tailored textures was more complicated than expected, because i found the reference image (on www.scifi3d.com) but was square instead of the radial and the result seemed patently wrong :

red arrows: direction of the meshes, blue arrows: direction of the texture

To resolve this problem there are three ways :

1. leave everything like that, but is used only for rendering the suburbs far away, so the details are not too visible
2. change the texture and make it as radial.
3. make a massive mapping activities!

We exclude the point 3 (too hard) and remains the 2nd point that requires some work with photoshop and rendering "appropriate" in 3d studio, in order to recover a more consistent texture that will solve the problem (albeit with a small defect...)

We create some of "slices" as wide as a row of buildings in the background :

and apply the textures with 4 separate provisions so that they are not perfect copies, which multiply and rotate until you get a circle, which then rendered and adjusted in Photoshop :

now meshes and textures have the same orientation

at the end we will get our texture :

...taht applied to the model will eliminate the defect mapping :

It only remains to make the setup of a scene and press render !

you can easily find the flaw in the image that I wrote above: in the vertical mapping you can see that the texture is not well positioned ... but a bit of postwork with photoshop can solve the problem ...

That's all !! leave your comments and your ideas...

Another render with some nice free models from sci-fi 3D