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OK, I have had a bit of an enforced break from the computer and 3D as I built a load of cupboards for somebody, and yes, I mean a load of them — twenty seven altogether, some of them large enough to walk into. I'll be getting back to customising Urban Sprawl 3 and the Streets of Utopia soon, but here's a quick interlude where I customised Eastern Steampunk in a way that was much easier. As well as transferring the standard set to Blender I took all the pipework and vents out to make it into a lovely stone building cluster than looks like something you might find in Thailand or Vietnam if you looked hard enough. I don't do steampunk renders but a Stonemason set for $2.99 was irresistible. I used the same world settings in Blender, using the Physical Sky and Atmosphere plug-in, yet one render is much brighter due to all the bounce lighting from the light coloured walls. Interesting that the Blender Cycles render engine does that so accurately.
This second render is of the original unaltered set as it imported into Blender:
Well hello! I haven't died, nor given up on customising stuff, I just had to do a lot of other stuff for a while and 3D faded into the background for a bit. However I have now resumed work on the shopping centre for the Streets of Utopia. The building is complete, now I have to model some low-poly tables and chairs for the cafés & restaurants in the building. These will not be intended for close up use, just made to look adequate through the windows. I may have a go at making or finding some low poly diners to sit in some of those places.
Nowadays I always add at least a hint of haze to outdoor renders when they are final finished images. Test renders like the ones above, no, it's not worth the setup time, and as well as that I want no haze anywhere so I can see the fine details.
I bought Urban Sprawl 3 and The Streets of Utopia during one of the recent sales. I bought them both for kitbashing around with so I'm really looking forward to reading and following this thread. I'm gonna have to find some sort of tutorial though, something that teaches a quick and dirty way to add kitbashed items to the library.
Oh, boy, some stages of this are tedious. Like placing all those tables and chairs, that took a while and I have only done one of the top five floors; all of those are supposed to be cafés! I also had to add a lot of lights so you can see what you're eating if you're in there, and so we can see that there are in fact tables and chairs in there. I can see I am going to have to add some low-poly people too...
I thnk it will look better if I take the wooden floor material from the ground floor and put on all of the floors, as I did in the cafés. I may also put some different coloured walls in the shopping areas lower down, and maybe more pictures on the walls.
I can also see myself putting another set of double doors leading from that lower café out onto the rooftop, then I could put some tables out there on the roof. Of course if I do that I will need to add some of those glass and metal barriers around the edge so people don't fall off and hit their heads on the paving slabs below. It makes such a mess...
Can you not just duplicate all the furniture nodes, group them and raise them to the other levels?
That is a good start, but it becomes very obvious if you leave it like that so you need to rearrange the tables on each floor so it doesn't look like an obvious CG stack of models. I also have circular tables for some floors and rectangular ones for other floors, plus more than one design of chair. Why would different café owners all buy their tables and chairs in the same place? Yep, I am thorough.
Yes, sorry. I meant to use that as a starting point to populate the area.
That's a good idea of course, and I'll use it. It still ends up being a bit of a tedious task. I also need to put more pictures on the walls, though in the eating areas I want them much smaller than the ones on the shop walls.
You mean like a subset?
This is Urban Sprawl 3 with a few buildings replaced by Polish's Cyberpunk Back Alley building, and adorned with other goodies from that bundle. I didn't render the sky animation yet, so it's just a blank, black background in this.
I added emmissive bulbs to the police car that comes with Urban Sprawl 3 - which is chasing Human's "Majestic" Aston Martin DB5 - both using Linday's Animation Four Wheeler Template. Fun Stuff!
The quality of the animation is good, but the video repeats itself too much. If you cut it much shorter it will have a lot more impact.
All my renders are made in Blender, so I use Instancing of the tables & chairs extensively to save memory. It does work well and the scene scarcely uses more memory than having just one of each item. I can put geometry nodes systems together to make random scatterings of plants or other objects on selected surfaces, but I haven't worked out how to do the kind of "nearly regular" arrangements that tables and chairs have. It's OK, I have just three floors to do and I have worked out how to use duplication a bit more effectively for those remaining.
Both are superb products. I have learned a lot by using Blender to examine how they are put together.
This evening I finished adding the tables and chairs to the dining floors, so this version of the building is nearly finished. I have a few more tweaks to make to the shopping floors and then I will be able to call this version of the shopping centre done. The remaining two versions will just have all the English text replaced with my alien language typefaces for use in those alien versions of the city.
And it took several attempts to make that last post, with yet more "Bad Gateway" errors nearly persuading me to give up.
OK, I think this version of the shopping centre is complete. I'll come back and look at it tomorrow just in case, and if anyone thinks it needs anything urgent done to it please say so.
Since it is the work of a few seconds to swap the texture map and the illumination mask here are the two alien versions of the shopping centre. If any model geometry needs updating I can do it on one version and just swap out the maps again.
Looking at Utopia Shops 1-07, I can't help but imagine it would look pretty nice if those fascia panels were made of a semi-polished aluminium, catching the specular from the sun, with just the slightest bit of bloom to make it glisten!
I want it to fit into the rest of the city though, so I keep as much of the building as possible unaltered. It might look very cool though, you're right.
OK, that building looked a bit too empty when I looked at it again, so here is what I hope is the final version:
Actually that isn't quite the final version. When the camera is placed close to the building it becomes obvious that those shop shelf units are just boxes with a texture map on each side, so I am going to more heavily tint the windows to make it harder to see inside. The more heavily tinted windows will also make it cooler to sit in the cafés on sunny days, so the air conditioning won't have to work so hard. Saves energy too!
Since that is such a simple change I won't post images of it until I integrate the building back into my customised versions of The Streets of Utopia.
When the Galaxy Diner came out it was on offer for a short while for a mere $3.99. That was a crazy bargain for such a fabulous set, so I snapped it up. In a forthcoming illustrated story from me it's going to be Theresa's Diner, on a planet in a completely different universe to ours. So the set had to be customised to suit. Here are the results so far:
I don't intend to make many more changes to the diner, it will mostly be just making some parts of it cleaner. Theresa keeps a clean place!