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This 'Manhattan Project' I am doing for Shawn Rogers (NewGuy) is coming along really nice... I decided that to do a proper NYC you need to also model what lies across the rivers... which is Staten Island, Brooklyn, Jersey, the Bronx and the Atlantic Ocean... among others. (Bridges, Statue of Liberty, ships...)

 

The project is for the Major League Soccer's New York Red Bulls... and next I will be modeling their stadium... so the zoom can continue right into midfield!

 

Texturing is minimal... all is heavily stylized... just needed to capture the 'feel' of the city. I will render a high res over the holiday weekend with particle trees, reflections and shadows at 720P...

 

DIG! (Thanks to Shawn for the patience, the permission to share with the forum, and the gig!)

NYC1.mov

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Frame 1 done... so I junked it up with text.

 

No duplicator wizard used, just good old copy and paste and heavy usage of action objects. There is a skydome with a gradient material (white to blue) and there is a Darksim material called 'Division' on the ground to add more boxxy subdivided urban junglry. I am thinking about adding clouds...

2011_NYC_3D.jpg

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Thanks everyone...!

 

Nancy, temporal scintantilization-bickus-dickus? Lost me on that one... it is a proxy flight plan... Shawn and Co. will do with the camera whatever as they wush.... where's my dictionary...?

 

Did I bevel? Heck no.

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Very impressive Matt!

 

I've always wanted to do something like that with a large city but could never muster the patience for it.

Your hard work is on full display here.

 

Most excellent.

 

 

Note: Perhaps one way to defeat the flickering bickus-dickus ™ would be to render significant portions of the sequence out as a still frame (for those areas where the camera will allow it) and run your camera work on that still frame. It'd be a bit like animating from Pose to Pose to Pose with a whole lot of Inbetweens where your key buildings are the main objects being inbetweened. Think in terms of the old Multiplane camera technique where the background can rotate and pan as the camera moves in. When and where appropriate switch to high speed (blurred or denoised?) 3D. Now that I think about it... this might be a great opportunity to push the frames out on 2s where each image is repeated. That's a guess.. but it might be enough to break the sequence out of the standard CG feel while avoiding the FBD.

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Nice city model - very VERY nice!

Regarding the flickering bickus-dickus ™ :

If, as I suspect, the flickering bickus-dickus ™ refers to the flicker of high-detail tiny objects as they move across limited resolution, then most of it will disappear with higher resolutions.

The other solution would be using a depth map to blur objects at distance > n (where n is an arbitrary distance from the viewer at which details alias) slightly to help clear up the flicker (a type of temporal aliasing)

 

Great stuff!

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Oh... THAT flickering-bickus dickus! Yeah- this is a quarter-res 1 pass render... possibly tomorrow I will have a full res to share, it's rendering right now at 1280 X 720 with 5 passes @ 7-8 min per frame.

 

I really-really-really need a rendering solution... long renders are KILLING me. I will look into using DOF eventually... also might be neat to use some FakeAO on this scene.

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Progress: I added clouds at the last minute before render last night... also, you can now see the particle trees that dot the landscape. This is with 5 passes multipass, I'll let it go over the weekend and we'll see it animate on Tuesday!

NYC_MC_2011_A.jpg

NYC_MC_2011_B.jpg

NYC_MC_2011_C.jpg

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Amazing! I assume you are using displacement maps for some of that detail?

 

 

That was the 1st thing I considered and tested, I mean- it would be great to simply make a 64bit grayscale patch image with varying levels of gray boxes to make buildings of various heights... no? Well, I could not get favorable results... and render time goes up with displacements as well as other issues... like how close can you put the camera to a displaced surface (not very) without problems. I found a Darktree material called 'Division' that I tweeked to get the 2ndary level of suburban chaos below the copy/paste boxes- not perfect by any means but a good cheat. It employs a bump for fake depth and renders quickly.

 

Here is one single patch with and without Division:

division_darktree.jpg

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This being a patriotic holiday here in the US...

 

HAPPY 4th of July to my fellow Americans.

 

(The Statue of Liberty model seen here was a 3DS model I found on a free model site and I used the AM Importer to convert it to a hash model, worked well... needs the base. These images used my 'Fisheye Lens' model and a Photoshop filter.)

Statue_of_Liberty2.jpg

Statue_of_Liberty.jpg

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It needs work in the 'scaling' department... somehow the Empire State building is not the tallest, and the Chrysler building is WAY too short. Rendertimes for the above movie(post #1) were 7 seconds per frame... the 1280 X 720 5 multi-pass with trees, shadows and reflections are taking an average of 7 minutes per frame... not too bad.

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Hi Vance- The water is even more simpler than a material... it is done with the group's 'roughness' and 'roughness scale' properties... set at very very low values... then the plane that was the water surface was keyframe moved/rotated over the length of the chor. It is a week point in the project that could be addressed, it was kept simple for the render time's benefit. THANKS!

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So... when are you going to texture the buildings?.. haha, just kidding. It looks wonderful, I love the style! Great work

 

 

I am actually thinking of shortcuts for slapping textures on there... like random patch images or something.

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Water looks cool, but I'd scale the ripples waaaaayyy down! Right now it goes from looking really cool and full-sized to looking like a tiny model in a fishtank when you zoom up to the stadium - the waves are too big!

 

Out of curiosity, how big is the skydome/cloud layer in relation to the city? Would you mind posting, like, a wireframe screenshot of the whole shebang from the side?

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Hey Meowx- Here is an alt view of the chor. The water size is a tradeoff, too small and you don't see it from the flyover... too big and the Passaic River is 'surf's up!'... I tried adjusting it on the fly, but the scaling is based off the water patch's center point which looked odd... so I went for a happy medium. It needs work, but I don't want anything that will add a lot to render times, because they are already a bit high.

NYC_alt_view.jpg

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