Create an Awesome 3D Future City in 3ds max

Important Notes

In order to create this scene you will need a really good computer. There will be millions of polygons and dozens of lights to render. I’m using 4-core Intel processor with 4GB of RAM and my 3DS Max crashed several times before I made the entire scene and managed to render it. Make sure that you save your work often! Also, to avoid lags and freezes inside of 3DS Max I suggest to hide all the objects that are temporarly unused. You may also split whole scene into smaller parts and work with different parts separatly. We will use metric units at first and then we will swap back to generic.

Modeling the City Basemesh

Use top view to create a cylinder that has radius set to 40m, height set to 4m, Cap Segments to 16 and Sides to 64. Right-click on a move tool (1) and move your  cylinder at [0,0,0](2). This is a base of our city. We will add some more buildings and details to it.

Hide the cylinder and create a sphere. Place it in the middle of the scene. That’s going to be the main “tectum building”.

Now try to add some details. I used extrude and bevel tools to add some boxes around. Afterwards I scaled it a bit .

Unhide all. Your tectum should fit perfectly into the scene.

Now, let us start working with the cylinder. Select it (you may hide sphere for a better visibility) and convert it to editable poly. Add an extra edge as in the image below.

After that switch to polygon sub-level of an Editable Poly and start to work on topology of the virtual city. Select all the top polygons and deselect area that will be your street. This way you should now have the polygons that you want tobe your buildings selected.

Extrude selected polygons just a little bit.

Unhide all the objects again and deselect polygons in the middle of your cylinder (we don’t need them because they won’t be visible anyway).

Future Buildings

It is time to swap back to generic units setup as I mentioned earlier. Go to Customize -> Units setup and swap them to generic. We will now use a Greeble plug-in for 3DS Max. It is not necessary but this will make your work faster. This plug-in allows you to create some random polygons so it’s perfect for little details but don’t use everywhere because you will change your work into something monotonous. Here’s a little more information about Greeble from Wikipedia:

A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects. They serve no real purpose other than to add complexity to the object, and cause the flow of the eye over the surface of the object to be interrupted, usually giving the impression of increased size.

Modeling the Future Buildings

Add a Greeble modifier to selected faces (it is very important to have them really selected while applying a Greeble!). At first, it will help us with constructing buildings and then we will use it to add some more small details.

To begin with, the only thing we need is the bottom part of each building. Use the values shown on the image below for Min/Max height and taper and deselect Generate widgets checkbox. Also, turn on Select Tops option.

Add an Edit Poly modifier to the cylinder. Go to the Polygon sub-level and use Inset button (make sure you have all the tops of the building selected). Change inset Amount to 2.0 .

Deselect all the faces. Go to Polygon: Smoothing Groups rollout and click the Select By SG button. Highlight all the numbers (there should be five) and click OK.

Lots of faces should become selected now but we need even more.

Go to the left viewport and select all the polygons like on the image below.

Go to Edit->Select invert or just press Ctr+I on your keyboard to select inverse. The edges of your buildings should become selected now.

Add them a smoothing group (like 32). This will help you in the further steps.

Now it’s time to add some little details on the roofs. Click on the Select by SG under Polygon: Smoothing Groups rollout, pick number five and click OK. Only the middle faces on your roof should become selected now. While they are slected, add a Greeble modifier. For the setting use something similar to these below.

Add a new Edit Poly modifier. Turn on Polygon sub-level and click Select by SG button. This time pick a number 32. We are going to make rails on top of all the buildings.

Add a new Greeble modifier and use the settings presented on the image below (or just pick your own at this point).

Using the techniques from the previous steps I added some details to the ring outside the tectum building.

Future City Streets

Now let’s focus on the “streets”. You can convert your city to an Editable Poly or just add another Edit Poly modifier, select all your streets and detach them. Hide everything but the street. Select all the polygons on the streets like on the image below and inset them. After that extrude them with negative value. Having faces still selected add Greeble modifier (just some mode details).

I made an aerial on top of the main building. Then I created two pipes using torus. Finally, I added some really simple models visible on the screenshots below and copied everything eight times around using Array tool (Tools->Array).

Detail close-up. As you can see I made this bracket and copied it a few times. Also, I added some Sphere VrayLights with little radius and Intensity to 2.0. At the end I created bigger VrayLight Plane.

This is how it looks after I copied it eight times around.

I also made a few extra, bigger and unique buildings and added them to the scene. Use your imagination to create something interesting !

 
 

City Composition

In the first part you’ve created all the necessary models so let’s arrange a city from them now. If you haven’t moved anything you should now have a cylinder with buildings placed at the position [0,0,0] and some little buildings that haven’t been placed anywhere yet. Place them as you like on top of the cylinder (see the final image). This is going to be our main city segment but we will also need a second less detailed part in the background. This is how it will look like.

Background City

Create a plane that is 150 meters wide and 150 meters long. Use 24 for width and lenght segments and move it to the position like [-34.7m, 37.9m, 3.7m](that’s how I placed it). Basically we need to create some buildings there. You can follow along the first part of this tutorial and use Piotr’s techniques to create some random buildings or you can just apply a greeble modifier to the plane. The background city won’t be visible as clearly so nobody will notice what it is really made of (unless you are planning high resolution renders). I applied a Greeble twice to the entire plane. First Greeble makes some space between polygons (I set taper fairly high) and the second one creates a little buildings. Hide the plane for now.

Camera Placement

Create a standard camera and use the following settings:

• Lens: 43.455841mm
• FOV: 45.0 degrees
• X=15.472652m, Y=-73.240763m, Z=24.403214m
• Roll: 0.0
• Target placement is [-1.814419m, -1.235621m, 18.575125m]
• Target distance should be 74.280222m afterwards
• Go to render options and change the output size settings to: width=1280, Height=1500.

This is how I placed my camera. These are random settings. I just moved the camera around and finally placed it like this because I tried to capture most of the buildings located on the cylinder and I left some space for the sky above everything. If you are creating different city feel free to place your camera as you like. We’ll do here a region render later.

Future City Materials

Press “M” on your keyboard to open up a material editor. Create a new VrayMtl, change its Reflect color from black to dark grey. Now follow the screenshot below to set up the maps like I did. Also, put a VrayHDRI in the Environment slot. You can use here whatever HDR image you want but I guess the industrial one will be the best choice. This will be highly reflective texture to use on all the buildings and tectum.

Sci-fi Textures

You can use textures that I created.

Other Materials

Clone the previous material. We have to change some settings in order to create something less reflective for the streets and pipes.

Mapping

Now we need to modify UV mapping. All you need to do is to add an UVW Mapping modifier to every object on the scene. Change mapping mode to Face. After that you can assign materials to objects.

Lights

At this point add any missing elements to the scene to make it look like on the image below. I’ve used VRay lights everywhere and they basically are placed like on the image below. Try to play with different setting here and make some test renders to see how will it look like when you move them around. I’m leaving it up to you because most likely your placement will be good for further playing with it.

Matte Painting

Finally, that’s how your render should look like in Adobe Photoshop (don’t forget to save its alpha channel as a separate image). Mask the edges and the bottom part because we won’t need them.

City Extension

Hide the main cylinder and unhide the plane with the background city. Render it. After that paste it into the Photoshop and use your cylinder’s Alpha mask to get rid of the part of the background city in front of the camera.

City Extension Adjustments

We don’t have an infinite city so it’s good to add some fog to hide this fact. Use Gradient tool to achieve it and set the layer’s blending mode to Screen.

Background Buildings

Draw some skyscrapers there where your horizon is and copy them a few times. You don’t have to create anything detailed but better don’t follow mine. Think of something that looks more like a buildings instead .

Sky

To add a sky simply take a photo of one, render it or use a sky texture from the internet. I used one of the skies available on cgtextures.com. Paste it to your document and resize it if necessary. To fix the rest of the image paint something like on the images below on two different layers with brush. Set first layer to Overlay and the second to Multiply.

Final Touches

Add two Brightness/Contrast Adjustment layers with the following settings.

Conclusion

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