Twilight Render User Forum

I recently came across a video showing the vfx breakdown of the movie "Attraction", and getting a bit nostalgic of the views over the russian suburbs, I descided to try and make a scene like that myself. (Well, minus the spaceship )

Since the apartment buildings there have quite a lot of variation to the exterior, I figured it would be easier to make them modular. What I did here, was make a basic model of a part of the building (like a wall, a window, balcony railing and so on), and then made 5 - 15 different texture variations for each model. This would also make it easier to rearrange the components for when I'm using the same type of building more than once.

Since the buildings won't be viewed close-up, I didn't make the models detailed, so for example the windows are just two planes, one in front of each other with the texture projected onto them. I also didnt use bump maps, they won't really be visible from afar but they make the rendering take a lot longer. I will add specular maps for the roof and wallslater on tho. I plan on this being a pretty large scene so I'm cutting corners a bit here.

Anyway, here's what I got this far, used this one as my test building. The curtains are a bit repetetive, so I'll add more variations to them, but otherwise I'm hapy with the result.

I think that works, agree on the curtains but cannot see any problems as such. Nice job.

Soviet mood!
else cool render!

Didn't have too much time to work on this, but I got another building done and worked out the general layout for the scene. I also made something that is supposed to resemble a poplar.. I was trying to make them "light-weight", but I'm not sure that turned out too well

I don't understand why the aliens want to go to Russia so badly - everyone knows all Aliens speak English, don't these people watch the movies?

nice texture work on the building, and great looking trees!

wow, this is going to be a great project!

I hope the final result is the one you want to achieve
The "great looking trees" are too tall for a city

Thanks

The "great looking trees" have been fixed! As for the height, it's about right actually. This is Russia after all, and maintaining the suburbs in good condition isn't really on the priority list. So they just let all the trees grow to their natural size, most maintanence they ever see is the bottom of the trunk painted with a chalk solution.

Copy/Past from Wikipedia "... poplars have very vigorous and invasive root systems stretching up to 40 m from the trees; planting close to houses or ceramic water pipes may result in damaged foundations and cracked walls and pipes due to their search for moisture."

As they say, better late than never. This is the largest model I've done this far, coming in at over 610 million polygons, and sketchup didn't really like that . But after getting rid of a bunch of unnececary stuff and doing a few optimizations it seemed to work fine most of the time, altho I did get a bit burned out on it and ended up putting it off for a few months. Another problem was that rendering it completely maxed out my ram, so I couldn't really use my comp while it was running. Feels good to have it done tho

Here's the result: Happy holidays and see you all next year!