Design an urban city scene

Mohsen Hashemi details the step-by-step creation process for his rocket launch concepts

Build an impressive city render with Mohsen Hashemi’s guide

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate step by step how I created my recent rocket launch artwork, and hopefully it may answer some of your own questions regarding how to go about building a large urban city scene in 3D.

Creating a large-scale cityscape can seem like a daunting challenge and knowing where to start and what workflow to use can present the largest hurdle. Once you have decided on a direction, based on your inspirations and any reference material you have collected, the task becomes much easier. Creating the actual buildings is less of a problem and in this stepby-step tutorial I will show you my typical workflow process for this kind of project.

Because of the distance of the camera from the individual assets you will find you don’t need to worry about the smallest details, as it is much more about scene management than anything else and once the models are done you can focus on the layout, lighting and cameras to get the perfect render.

After you have read this article, if you still have questions about the workflow, feel free to contact me through social media and I will try to help as much as I can.

01 MODEL THE CITY SPACE

To start I used a very simple Google Maps 3D landscape for some initial inspiration for how the city landscape might look. Then, using some very simple lines and extrudes, I added more elements to the environment and tried to find the best possible angle for the camera to add more urban details.

02 URBAN STORY

The premise behind this artwork comes from two different stories depicting a rocket launch, so in the first shot I wanted to show the calm before the storm, for which the lights and colours helped me a lot. I didn’t want to have a big change in the scene when the stories changed, so I spent a lot of time finding the best composition to tell the story.

03 ADD THE DETAILS

When I was happy with the composition, I started to think about the type of urban city that would work well with this story. As you can see, I tried some different buildings to show variation of the city space, but the big question about this workflow is, how much is enough detail? I added as many buildings as I felt might be enough. A tip for avoiding repetition is to use lights and shadow on some of the buildings.

04 SCENE MANAGEMENT

Using Forest Pack and Railclone helped a lot with proxy scattering and made the whole process easier, but I have to confess, using a layer-based image and identifying each layer and forest makes your scene even more manageable and easier to search and find.

I used a Brick Visual layer base Max file, and as you can see in the image I made a specific name for each forest, and all were easy to control. I also made different forests for the foreground, midground and background to show the diversity of urban space.

05 LIGHTING AND MOOD

I used Pulze Scene Manager for the lighting settings (more on this in the next step). As you can see, I didn't use very complex lighting for this project, as I always try to keep things simple and understandable. Following references, for the mood I tried to have a foggy environment as the main subject to reach my desired final result.

06 WORK WITH THE SCENE MANAGER

It's very easy to work with the Scene Manager. If you start fresh with a scene, you can make your first ‘mood’ in terms of the lighting, camera composition and so on, and then add to the Scene Manager with the + key in the top right. Then, based on your project’s needs, you can choose from the left menu which setup is going to be added to your scene.

For other moods, lights and settings you would only need to create a new setup and add new menus, and any time you need to swap from one mood to another to add more details or change the settings, you can do so with only one click in the main list.

07 SET THE ATMOSPHERE

This is an easy process, but also a very time-consuming step. For me, this step is vital for creating that desired mood. The amount of fog in the scene and in the background adds greater depth to the image, and as you see in the initial ‘Calm’ render, can also be used to create god rays. I used Aerial Perspective for the background fog and Environment Fog for the overall fog in the scene. I also added some colour to add more variation between the light and in order to bounce the colours in the fog.

08 POST-PRODUCTION

Mostly I try to reach 60 to 80 per cent of the result in the frame buffer and do some very subtle edits in post-production. For this project there weren’t any huge edits in Photoshop; I focused more on colour corrections and painting the parts related to the launch stand with smoke from the launch. In the beginning, I added the details with some real photos, and then I added hue/saturation to control the lights in the scene. In this case, playing with the hot and cold colour had a big effect on the mood of the image.

Finally, just add a Camera Raw filter to boost the contrast and sharpness. •

THE LAUNCHER These two images depict a rocket launch, with the above shot eliciting a ‘calm before the storm’ feeling

02 Detailing For this kind of work you should be careful not to add more details than you need. Heavy files are always a big problem and it may be more difficult to spot any errors. Try to use your assets carefully and aim for an uncomplicated approach as much as possible, avoiding any unnecessary details.

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Keep the file clean Bear in mind that the most professional artworks always come out of a clean file. Many edits and changes made during the workflow are much easier to control in a clean file. My advice is if you are working on a project over a few weeks, every couple of days open your file and delete additional details, or if there’s anything you replaced don’t keep them – unhide in the layers and delete them (but remember to save the file in a new version, just in case). 07

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