Scene City Blender

[Stayla Casillas]

Traditionallyit must be constructed by hand in a 3d application by an artist. While this approach gives the artist full control, it requiresskill and a LOT of time to complete an entire city. Don't even mention if later you want to change its layout.

One can use tricks, shortcuts, and other Blender features such as particles, or random mesh extrusions to accelerate the work, it remainstedious nonetheless. And the results aren't always as great as our vision. Simply because there is a lot to do, and Blender is 'only' a generic3d application, not a specialized city builder.

Time is precious. You cannot place each and every piece of a city by hand, there are hundreds of them, if not thousands. Instead let SceneCitydo the boring work for you (like instancing and positioning objects), while you keep the fun creative part (like modeling and animating).

Describe the city you want in SceneCity using parameters, such as city size, what buildings to use, where to place them etc... the whole city isthen created in a matter of seconds or few minutes, ready for you to play with, like adding cars, pedestrians, changing whatever you want, andrendering still images or animations.

Changing something is as easy as changing a parameter value, then recreating the city. Thanks to Blender, and depending on which instantiationmethod you choose, you can even modify a city without recreating it. Modifying the model of a building automatically changes all instances ofthat building everywhere it appears in the city.

SceneCity comes batteries included: props, roads and buildings. Load them in a click, and generate a city. It's that simple. Once included inyour scene, they're just standard Blender meshes, objects and materials, so you can study them, modify them, or delete them.

SceneCity comes batteries included: props, roads and buildings. Load them in a click, and generate a city.It's that simple. Once included in your scene, they're just standard Blender meshes, objects and materials, so you can study them,modify them, or delete them.

You can pack all of them in the .blend file if needed, they're not 'linked' but 'appended' to your scene, in Blender'sterms. This is useful if you need to carry everything in a single .blend file, or for rendering on farms.

That's why you're not limited to the included libraries for your cities. You can mix, or use your own exclusively very easily. Tell SceneCity touse any mesh or group of objects with just a checkbox in the mesh's or object's options. Done. Next time you generate the city, it will be used.

For instance, this polluted city was made from scratch in the record time of 20 minutes, render time excluded, mostly modeling the assets.Notice how, from such low-poly texture-less assets, the city is large, complex and intricate.

Repeat your own road portion(s) meshe(s) along curves. This type of roads gives nice curves and very complex-looking, intricatenetworks. However it does not test for intersections and collisions with other roads and buildings, and does not support crossings.

Assemble straight portions, T-crossing portions and X-crossing portions together on a grid like the pieces of a giant brick game. Thistype of network is precise and will not overlap with other roads and buildings. However curved roads are not supported, though you canmodel your portions to be curved to a certain point.

Place the buildings randomly. Vary their size, and their density according to maps that can be procedural or image-based. Easy, fast,and looks very intricate and complex from far away. The buildings will overlap. You can put them on your terrains.

The buildings are placed precisely on a grid like the pieces of a giant brick game. They will not overlap with other roads andbuildings. Define different districts, such as residential, commercial and industrial for example.

I have been designing this addon for years and helping hundreds of users create cities for their projects, so I know for a fact that it does thejob. I also constantly update and improve SceneCity, month after month, so you get more features in time for the same price. That's why I canoffer a guarantee like this.

Export entire cities to Unity for realtime rendering and navigation. First you must have all your assets already in Unity: models, materials,prefabs for buildings, roads, and props (the included assets are pre-exported in a Unity package, you just have to import it into your Unityprojects).

Then generate your city from Blender, and export it using the specific node for it. The output is a text file describing your city. From Unityopen the SceneCity loader window, load the exported file, set all corresponding assets, and with the click of a button, your entire city isre-created in Unity, down to every prop object.

This method is a lot more efficient than exporting the entire city directly with FBX because you keep the control on your prefabs for thebuildings, roads and props. Use any prefab and modify them anytime after the city is imported. That includes complex objects with scripts,objects hierarchies, nested prefabs, physics setups, sound sources, LOD, and all other Unity prefab features.

The skies give realistic lighting extremely easily (basically in one click) AND they react properly with color grading and exposure settings inBlender. The sun is as bright as the sun in real life (thousand times stronger than a car's headlights), giving sharp and strong shadows underclear weather conditions.

SceneCity comes with SceneTerrain, another separate Blender addon, and a whole terrain generation solution in itself. With it you can generatedetailed terrains for a city, and for any other use. It is for Blender 2.79, but is gradually being ported to Blender 2.80+, and being moretightly integrated with the cities.

SceneCity integrates nicely in Blender's interface and the UI is clear and uncluttered as much as possible. It adds a new graph type intoBlender's node editor panel. It will also tell you when something is wrong, for example when a node's required input socket isn't pluggedyet.

What i would like to know is what i have to change in my scene to achieve the look i am going for. Inside of each of the buildings i have one plane with a city building texture on it and that is hooked up with an emission node.

I agree with Rix Yarbrough, the scene needs more light.

But the light is not to use it as is, but to play with it later in the compositor. It just asks for some glare filter for the windows. You can add material index pass to your render layer to use glare only for windows (and set pass index for the material as well). Or just use Emission render pass.

Believe me, you will never get an image like your reference with raw render only and no post-processing.

The community is pretty insane and so active, with many Youtube videos to help overcome difficulties. I also followed tutorials from Jama Jurabaev, Jan Urschel, Creative Shrimp, and the so much awesome Ian Hubert. These guys put so much knowledge into their videos that it inspired me a lot.

Delta City illustration has been made for a French challenge for Digital Painting School, an online digital art school where I started my artistic journey a few years ago. Until now, I try not to miss any challenges they make, even if time flies too fast with regular work. It concerns all kinds of artists, from full beginners to pros, and the ambiance is really cool.

I quickly assumed the fact that the last viable delta on earth will be the Nile, as it has provided health and resources to many civilizations for millennials. As life conditions and resources could be complicated, I chose wooden materials and a slight amount of scavenged components as a base to construct the houses and structures.

The main part of the city could be seen slightly in the background and is more like a classic stilt city. Tinkered wind turbines help to create a small amount of electricity to supply pumps and lights at night.

The first part was making the main stilt structures. I modeled them in VR using Gravity Sketch. I really love this piece of software, for VR sculpting and modeling is so much easier and faster than doing it on a flat screen.

Before rendering the base plate, I tweaked the lighting a bit and added some atmosphere to get some depth. Nothing fancy, just a cube with a principled volume shader. I also put a reflection probe on the water plane to have a slightly realistic feel on the water.

Generally, I always take some time to work in the compositor to tweak other stuff like AO, Mist and shadow pass, but not this time. I just used a color balance node to pull a bit more of the color vibe I wanted for the final image.

A few people, some floating plants, props and garbage were also hand painted over the render to give the scene more life. And the most important, I added a bit more fog and mist between the planes to add a bit more depth again.

I put an easter egg in the scene for people following Ian Hubert. The text on the first building is saying Delta City '' with the Huberfish font. This font has been shared by Ian on his Patreon and used in many of his projects.

I am really excited to be sharing this tutorial with you as this is my whole concept art process that I have been working on and refining since I started in the industry. My process includes everything from reference gathering and sketching, to how I use Blender for building out a kitbash set, how I put together the whole scene in 3D using blender, and finally, how I render the scene and bring it into Photoshop for the final paintover and polish.

There is over 3 and a half hours of recordings all fully voiced over as I explain my process. I have included sections where I go over the fundamentals and basics of how I use blender to navigate, texture and build out my designs as well as some of my most used addons.

If you are a beginner, intermediate or advanced artist who is looking to expand upon their 3D workflow with Blender and Photoshop, I believe that this tutorial can help with that. Thanks for stopping by!

Chapters:

-Introduction

1). References

2). Sketching

3). 3D: Kitbash Set Modeling in Blender

4). 3D: Environment Block out in Blender

5). Paintover: Image 1

6). Paintover: Image 2

7). Blender Tips, Addons and Rendering

Programs Used: Blender, Photoshop

Basics of Photoshop and Blender are recommended to get the most out of this tutorial. Photoshop, Blender and Pureref files not included.

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