• Wondering which camera, gear, computer, or software to buy? Ask in our Gear Guide.

Photoreal Cities

Nate North

Nate North

Hi everyone,

I'm currently working on developing photoreal virtual cities for my new project. I'm pretty advanced already, but I'm nowhere near where I need to be. Does anyone know of any good tutorials, programs, etc, that can help me get my cites up to a believable look?

Here's where I am so far, totally unusable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iqdg1Jv0Yko

and Here's where I need to be to proceed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9yYy_v54eQ

I'm already able to do the interiors, but need some help getting the procedurally generated city in the background to near photo detail.

Would appreciate any help.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Nate, your much more advanced then I, however, just looking at yours and trying to see whats "different" between it and the example you gave I picked up on a few items that might be useful..

The example seems to use a mix of actual photo assets and CGI.
The example has plants\organics in just about every outdoor shot
The example buildings look like they come from actual architectural designs
The example camera moves are much faster
The example buildings are all in a white\concrete color scheme.

I don't know, maybe that will give you some ideas..
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
wheatgrinder said:
Nate, your much more advanced then I, however, just looking at yours and trying to see whats "different" between it and the example you gave I picked up on a few items that might be useful..

The example seems to use a mix of actual photo assets and CGI.
The example has plants\organics in just about every outdoor shot
The example buildings look like they come from actual architectural designs
The example camera moves are much faster
The example buildings are all in a white\concrete color scheme.

I don't know, maybe that will give you some ideas..
Click to expand...

I got all that, except, sharp eye on the plants.

I can throw in an HDRI map anytime, and I have the photoreal buildings in check, as well as the interiors.

It's the medium distance CG buildings that are killing me. I'm using city generator right now and that seems to be a step in the right direction. Maybe you've got something with the white texturing on the midrange buildings. Sometimes color choice can be a huge cheat in CG, allowing you photorealism more easily.

thanks for the help
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
glad to be of any use...
also, i note that most cities only have a few tall buildings, seeing miles of sky scrapers makes me think "future" and not "real city." This is very noticeable in the example where the 4 twisty building rise out of the surrounding cityscape. On Manhattan island average building height is about 5 floors! (or so I read from dubious sources on the internet.. lol)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
excellent insight. I should probably look up some statistics like this and feed those numbers right into the generator. Hopefully I'm not walking into another python scripting tutorial here.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Well, in my experience with filmmaking, there is only so much knowledge on the net, and at some point it is necessary to start reading books. Books are still the default unit of knowledge, in my opinion.

Of course, 3-D animation changes to quickly that it may be difficult to find up-to-date print resources. Another disadvantage is you have to pay. However, books are better-written, more authoritative and more informative, while covering a wider range of topics. Books!
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I used to do architectural renderings exclusively. I'll tell you some of the tricks I've picked up over the last few years.

  • Render in passes (ambient, diffuse, specular, shadows, etc) and comp together.
  • Divide the shots into foreground, midfield and background. Render them separate and comp them together.
  • Drop the contrast and saturation based on how far away the model is from the camera. Stuff in the distance can be almost desaturated.
  • Add some environmental fog/haze in two or three layers (midfield, background, extreme background)
  • Depth of field!
  • You can sell a day shot on almost anything by using a strong sun setup and global illumination.
  • No shadow is totally black.
  • For night shots, light from the street up with an orange/pink tint.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Anim8 said:
I used to do architectural renderings exclusively. I'll tell you some of the tricks I've picked up over the last few years.

  • Render in passes (ambient, diffuse, specular, shadows, etc) and comp together.
  • Divide the shots into foreground, midfield and background. Render them separate and comp them together.
  • Drop the contrast and saturation based on how far away the model is from the camera. Stuff in the distance can be almost desaturated.
  • Add some environmental fog/haze in two or three layers (midfield, background, extreme background)
  • Depth of field!
  • You can sell a day shot on almost anything by using a strong sun setup and global illumination.
  • No shadow is totally black.
  • For night shots, light from the street up with an orange/pink tint.
Click to expand...

I've heard about rendering in passes and seen others doing it, I like the effects of just crossfading the layers to show detailing as the scene animates.

What is the purpose of the multipass method? does this allow much faster tweaking of a particular errant element, or is there more to it?

Rather than spend a lot of your time, could you point me towards what in your opinion a good set of tutorials for someone familiar with max and vray but not with architectural rendering specifically? I'm trying to recruit architectural renderers, but they seem a difficult lot to talk into group projects, so I may end up doing it myself. At least I'll have render farm time.

If you could give me one quick pointer, tell me the difference between a strong and a weak sun setup? I put vray sun up, adjust for realistic color, and everything looks terrible and takes forever to render (on a dual xeon server)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Damn thats a very tall order.. I did a few cities for some shots, and it was always Matte painting over geometry. We found rendering everything for a scene with a lot of perspective to be too intensive to get to look photo real, even for a pro shop. Don't let that discourage you, there are a lot of tricks to be had.

Critting your city shot, I'd say more passes as Anim suggested. .. out of my eye, I'd say more occlusion, more bounce in your light, more detail, specular on windows, reflection maps, a bit more atmospherics, movement on the ground.

You can also mask problem areas with clouds, signs or motion blur.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Are you using CityEngine to do this?


http://www.procedural.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXVIuoPlMpY



You can try cgarchitect.com for tutorials: http://www.cgarchitect.com/resources/tutorials/default.asp

Look through the tabs in the render setup in Max, you should see the menu for rendering in passes.
Render passes let you adjust the diffuse, specular, ambient, shadows, etc separately. You have alot more control over the final image that way.

The Vray sun will work OK, but its slow. You can use Maxs default lights and get a faster render. With that much geometry you may want to use the old school method of lighting a large scene.
Put 8 spotlights around the model all pointing to the center. Drop the intensity down to .25 or so. Place either a Vray light or a Directional light as your sunlight source and make it stronger than the spots with a slight yellow tint. Youll need to play around with the intensity and shadow settings, but you can usually get something that renders pretty quick and doesnt look bad that way.
For a city scene, you dont need to do four passes for the GI. Set it to medium so it just does two. You can turn your secondary bounce setting down to less than .5 also.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top