My First SU City

[nevets2001uk]

After a few weeks of messing around with SU and KT and being truely inspired by the work I've seen on these forums I've decided to try my hand at building a city in SU. I really can't say how far I'll get with this as it's a spare time project but I'll try my best to update it as often as I can.

The city will be inspired by London as it's the only large city I've seen in person enough timesto get a feel for the place. I'm taking a fairly high detail approach and it may well kill my PC or software at which point I'd I have to change my approach. I'm creating each building seperately and then combining via groups and components into a complete city scene.

I'm trying to lay out my roads realistically but may have gone too detailed already in the small section I've started on. Not much to show right now exact a couple of quick test renders I've done on the area I've created so far. Thoughts and comments are welcome to help me improve my skills and design.

Overview of initial road layout:


Quick MLT Render of my first building with a couple of WIP street objects as well:

[Dac150]

I think your grid is off to a great start. Keep it up!

[toyota74]

you have good skills already,good start sofar.

[nevets2001uk]

Thanks for the comments. I did a little more on this over the weekend and will try to post a render once it completes. I've also replaced the two images as for some reason imageshack deleted them!

[verticalextropy]

Hi! Welcome. Indeed you're taking a detailed approach, I notice the bus stop, the grid, the park.

Great to see more cities sprouting, and btw you don't really need to render everything, we're hungry for updates!

[nevets2001uk]

Thanks for the welcome.

Yes I started very detailed and already realise for sanities sake as well as my PC's I may need to tone it down a bit. My main problem was creating detailed buildings that look real. Also I suspect that the polygon count was going to get too high too quickly. I added a second building that had something like 10,000 faces which on a city wide scale was going to be too much. Instead I've taken a leaf out of Pingyao's book and will utilise photo textures for many of the buildings.

My main problem was that I wanted realistic looking glass and reflections. Having read the Sta Fee thread I realised there was a simpler solution and have now created a test building using a photo texture and my own reflection map which I use inside Kerkythea to add realistic reflections to the scene. I may also experiment with bump mapping too.

Here's a newer render with another detailed building on the right (a WIP) and a photo-textured building on the left with reflection mapped windows. This simple model I feel looks better than my more detailed but badly textured models.



I'm going to try and stick with a more detailed grid and items such as street lights, bus stops, signs etc to create a realistic feel, while using a combination of simpler phototexture buildings and some detailed designs in specific areas. This should allow me to achieve realism whilst not taking me so long to build. Although I need to spend a lot of time collecting textures and creating the reflection maps

[Pingyao]

That building on the left looks super great, I'm sorry to say it looks better than your 10,000-faced design on the right Stick with it, i know it takes so long to collect textures. You don't have to make reflective maps for all of them, just the really obvious ones, plus the more reflective surfaces the slower the render.

[toyota74]

looking at the render before I read the text I
didnt know it was textured.So well done.

[nevets2001uk]

Thanks for the comments.

Originally Posted by Pingyao

That building on the left looks super great, I'm sorry to say it looks better than your 10,000-faced design on the right Stick with it, i know it takes so long to collect textures. You don't have to make reflective maps for all of them, just the really obvious ones, plus the more reflective surfaces the slower the render.

I have to 100% agree and much prefer the simple photo textured model at the moment. It's silly that a simple cube can look better than the detailed models but the texture just looks real. I will still include some more detailed models but will need to work heavily on textures to make them as real looking.

This evening I've been spending some time playing with normal maps for my textures. It's not something I'll need for most renders but I was interested in learning about them anyway and thought I'd try applying them to my city scene. The technique still needs some work and getting the correct effect without affecting the reflection was not 100% correct but to my eye it does seem worth me doing for closeup building renders. I've included two examples, one with no normal mapping, one with (perhaps slightly too overdone) to illustrate my experiments.

No normal mapping:


With normal mapping:

[Flamesrule]

Nice!

Really like that building!

[Pingyao]

I think go for a normal map (bump setting) somewhere in between the two. Looking good though.

[nevets2001uk]

Thanks. I think I'm getting somewhere slowly which is the main thing. A quick update of the latest edition to the street and I also thought it sensible that there be an entrance to the first phototextured building as well!

[Flamesrule]

woah nice buildings!Whats yout city called and whats the pop.?

[treras93]

how do you make reflection maps and use them in kerk?

[nevets2001uk]

I've not thought up a name or worked out the oversize yet. Will try to think of something and update when I do.

Originally Posted by treras93

how do you make reflection maps and use them in kerk?

I'll follow up (hopefully later today) with a quick step by step of my process.

Here's a new render showing a glass high rise appearing. It's only a basic model at the moment and need work on the entrance and some improved texturing but it's coming together. What do people think, does it sit well in the scene?

[ertiikus]

lookin great man!

[nevets2001uk]

Creating and using a reflection map

Here's a quick step by step of how I'm ucrrently using a reflection map with phototextures to get reflections in my renders. It's still something I'm experimenting with and there may be better methods to produce the same result but for now this works for me.

Step 1: Grab a phototexture



Step 2: Open it in Photoshop or GIMP (any editor will do!). I prefer GIMP for this stage as the selection tool is quicker to use.

Create a new layer and fill it with black. Set the opacity to 30% for the time being. Using the selction tool select the glass in the windows and fill it with about 80% grey. The lighter the grey the more reflective the glass will appear.

Repeat this for all windows and set the opacity back to 100%. Save the resulting map as a jpeg.



Step 3: Add the phototexture as normal to the model in SU. Export the scene to KT and then edit the material you used for the building. I create a new layered material and on the first layer at a matt/phong layer and set the diffuse to the phototexture.



Create a second layer of diametric glass and add the reflection map jpeg to the reflection setting of the material.



Apply the material and once rendered the glass should have reflections. You can play with weights etc to adjust the reflectivity.

As I say I'm fairly new to KT and SU so this might not be the best approach. On downside I've seen is that the glass can appear to "float" slightly on some textures which is due to the shadows etc in the texture. It's only noticable closeup but I'm playing with options to see if I can improve the look further.

I hope this helps.

[nevets2001uk]

A couple of new renders which churned out earlier.

The first is a night render test for my own interest and I'm pretty pleased with the result.



The second is my trial of a road marking technique I'm implementing. I wanted to be able to be very specific with my road markings when the time comes but without introducing too many polygons. Oh and I've added my trendy bin design into the scene as well.

[nevets2001uk]

More road markings:

[treras93]

Thanks so much for the tutorial on reflection maps!

that night shot looks awesome!