Create an Awesome 3D Future City – Day 1
on Aug 18 in Matte Painting, Modeling by Piotr JaroszekIn this tutorial, I will show you how to create an advanced city of the future inside of 3DS Max. This part of the tutorial will show you how to create all the objects and composite them together. In the second part we’ll take a look at the materials and lights. We’ll also post-process the final image to make it look outstanding! Let’s get started!
Future City
That’s what we are going to create. I made this image with Paul but he’s mostly responsible for post-processing part. The subject of this tutorial was suggested by a founder of the presidiacreative.com blog – Eric. Thank you for a great idea!
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 
!
Conclusion
Congratulations! You’ve just made all the necessary obejcts and accomplished this part of the tutorial. The second part will explain you how to set up your materials, lights and post-process entire scene in Adobe Photoshop: Create an Awesome 3D Future City – Day 2.Subscribe to our RSS feed and don’t miss another great tutorials!
Wow guys, this is incredible, I can’t wait for day 2. One of the best 3D tutorials I’ve seen, keep up the awesome work.
I’m impressed too
Great models and the composition Piotr!
realy amazing
WoooooooooooW
Amazing images 
very nice tuto, tanks
muito bom mesmo caraca meu valeu mesmo brother e nós
it’s impressive! we are on Zion
gret tutorial, thx!
this is wonderful I like..thanks
You make the whole process seem so awesomely easy
I’ve never considered doing 3D images, but I think I’ll get it into it now.
very nice tutorial!
hay this is sree kumar
this is wonderful tutorial and thank you sir
yes indeed
excellent tutorial
thanks a lot
Awesome 3D Max tutorials. thanks
Thank you all! I’m more than happy to hear that you like it.
WOW!! nice tutorial!
Ok… soooo maybe i’m stupid here but why when I try to scale a ring of faces around the sphere does it cause it to shrink in the opposite way as I scale it? That is hard to explain but when I try to scale instead of scaling equally out it causes the circle to become an elongated oval.
Wow, this tutorial is AWESOME!!!! THANKS!
Oh, and about the performance issues, just check “modify for render only” in greeble.
this is very nice sir.
ehh it was pretty good finished it in like 20 mins no challenge at all
Great Tutorial!
But there is something bothering me.. every time I use greeble and add a new edit poly modifier, my cilinder somehow looses quality, some faces disappear and in the end it transforms intro an unregular shape. Do you know how to solve this?
Sorry for late response. I guess greeble modifier cannot be applied to round surfaces. Make sure you’re using it on polys that have four edges only.
I don’t understand these tutorials. They go through the really easy part of just making a sphere and a cylander, then adding greeble. Then they say OK now make 8 models and through them on there and add some roads. The end. What?!?! What happened?! It started out great, explaining everything in detail, then BOOM! It basically says finish the rest yourself. The begining of this tutorial was amazing, but the moment it got to the streets step you might of well as just said finish it yourself, because that’s how informative it was. Why would you do that? You might as well of not even made a tutorial!
this is not for beginers
))
Um, then why does it start like one? Can it at least be consistent? Why have something that starts like a beginners tutorial, then halfway through just says “Now make this and put it there and your done. tada.” That’s not helpful AT ALL. Now more advanced people don’t follow it because they read the top and think its for beginners. Beginners follow it then get screwed over later on. Not a good tutorial at all. Sorry.
Hey Josh, yes, you’re right, it’s rather a tutorial for more advanced users who know how to use 3ds Max already. It starts like this because creating main cylinder and cameras is actually VERY important in this case. Those buildings at the end are quite simple. They are just boxes and cylinders with a few omni lights. Furthermore, these buildings are not so important (and they will be really small on renders) so just try to create anything similar to them.
It’s not explained in detail because it would require quite a lot additional steps and Piotr considered it unnecessary.
Take a look at them once again and I’m sure that you’ll notice that they consist of boxes and cylinders. I’m also sure you’ll be able to recreate them yourself easily!
This is a great tutorial, I’ve learned a heap and I’ve been doing very well, right up to the render. My PC is a fairly fast Quad proc with 4gig ram, but for some reason I just can’t get the Vray render times within acceptable limits. Do you guys have any suggestions? My last attempt was clocked in at 107 hours and that was at medium-low settings.
Hey Fazz, thanks!
You can find material and lights settings in the second part of this tutorial (they are crucial): http://forcg.com/tutorials/modeling/create-an-awesome-3d-future-city-day-2/
We used VRay rendering engine to get the results like that. It was rendering about 2-3 hours on a Quad processor. First try to reduce render resolution. In VRay settings try to reduce light samples as much as possible or lower the number of subdivs wherever possible. That’s a bit strange because I used almost default VRay settings and render times were acceptable. I set Irradiance Map to ‘Low’.
If none of above helps I would recommend to reset all the VRay settings (I assume it renders quickly on default settings, right?) and turn on everyting step by step to see what causes long rendering times.
If that doesn’t solve your problem, let me know and I’ll post here additional screenshots with my settings.
thank u 4 sharing…