Quote:
Originally Posted by travis3000
I miss the days when we had the actual real life depictions of future skylines, especially in Toronto. The lego block look is cool don't get me wrong, but if you really want to impress people you have to make it look as realistic as possible. I wish I knew how to make those! I guess the user that did it before isn't on these forums anymore.
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I feel like you're forgetting that this is a hobbyist and enthusiast forum, and these skylines are being made for fun, not by industry professionals.
The photorealistic shots you're talking about are a product of photo editing. For me personally, I don't know (or honestly care) nearly enough about photo editing to create those hyper-realistic shots, and I come from an engineering background so CAD based skyline models are what comes naturally for me. Now, it is absolutely possible to make these models in an even greater detail with high-quality render software, but this comes with a whole host of issues. Higher detail requires more processing power and much more time to complete. If you're attempting to model an entire city in high detail, you have to pretty much start from scratch (since highly detailed models don't exist publicly) and this takes a lot of time and processing power to have them open all together at once, as well as professional modeling software/rendering software.
It's so much simpler when rendering skylines to just opt for a simple approach so things load easily and models can be completed quickly. Personally, my simple massing models generally only take a few minutes each in SketchUp, and can be easily popped into Google Earth for visualization from any angle, and this is more than adequate for the purpose of posting here. I have made more complex building models before (all the way down to the structure with high detail on the facade) and even just one complex model will slow things down immensely. It's just not worth it to do it like that, and I don't have the time or computational power to model a whole city like that.
We're all 3D modelers here at the moment. If you want photorealistic skylines here, then your best bet is to learn Photoshop because as far as I can tell, this paradigm doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.