This scene is the continuation of a series inspired by H.G. Wells novel "War of the Worlds" Once again it shows Martian War Machines - this time hunting people in London. For this series I designed my own model of Martian War Machine. On a couple of first pictures from War of the Worlds series, I used two other models. First mesh was made by Derrin Proctor, and it is based on musical version of " War of the Worlds" from the '70. The second one is Kuro Kuma's model, soundly based on description from the book. Musical model's design from the 70' is simply lame - it looks like an electrical razor from the 60's ;-), Kuro Kuma's model looks much better, but it is not a very detailed model and it's design is not very "scary" - just fine for background scenes. I needed something dark, looking really threatening, with a taste of fin de siecle design - a machine with some characteristics of a leaving creature.

First I designed several concepts, then I selected the best features from each design and made a detailed drawing of the machine. Obviously it could be more fancy, but I did not want to have a too complex model, as when I made it, my modeling skills were just average. Next step involved modeling and texturing in C4D. When importedb the model to Vue, I made just some materials adjustments (ex. highlights or reflectivity)

For this scene I needed a large section of a city that would look like 1900 London. Modeling everything from scratch would be a tremendous task - so I decided to use Alain Garcia's models of Haussman style buildings (from mid XIX century). (Available on Cornucopia 3D) Original models have a very basic texturing, so texturing from scratch was needed.

I made a B&W "dirt mask" that I used to mix 2 bitmap based plaster materials. Both plaster materials used the same procedural pattern for stains over plaster, so so "dirt mask" only switched between 2 plaster bitmaps while stain patter remained identical - it produced really nice effect.

I also used a building model from TurboSquid - at first glance it looks OK, but later it revealed to be a total mess - it is a single mesh, with single material, without UV and with completely crazy polygon structure - ex. same triangles are used for walls and for windows glass ! (Look on orange triangles on the left picture) As I started to repair this model, I have basically to rebuild it completely. I should rather model my own building - it would be quicker. I applied numerous details on the original mesh like wall decorations and banners.

While studying pictures of end of XIX century London I noticed numerous signboards. Vue 5 allowed me to create such trade plates in seconds - all what I have to do was to open Vue's 3D Text Editor and write the text ! (by the way - you may find nice fonts HERE ). In order to obtain more realistic effect I decreased text object polygon count - it produced slightly misshapen borders and I rotated and displaced very slightly each character, which added some more "real world touch" to the scene.

Next I have to gather a crowd of running people - For this purpose low polygon Poser 4 models are best fitted - they are easy to pose and really lightweight. Huge models like Michael 3 from DAZ would require much more work to pose and would consume too much memory ( I have just 1 GB RAM) Well textured, low polygon model, based on real people, looks better than high rez models like Michael or Victoria (which rather resemble to a Barbie Doll than to a real human) Take a look on 4 models below :

From the right : - Real People model - 3 k polygons - e-on's preanimated character - 2 k polygons - DAZ 3D Victoria 3 - 247 k polygons - Poser 4 low rez character - 5 k polygons From the above example we see that Victoria 3 which uses 100 times more polygons (and consumes a lot of computer resources) does not look better than other much simpler models. OK, she is more versatile, you can dress her, undress, or morph her to a monkey or an alien or render her 3D teeth - but she is not the best choice for populating your scenes backgrounds. Not to mention completely crazy "Morph Injections System" with hundreds settings, among which it is very difficult to find the one you need. Setting such model requires a lot of time, and patience, that's why I prefered simple Poser 4 Low Poly character.

In order to create the crowd I've added several models of running people into Vue Ecosystem. To get better control how people are grouped in the crowd I used a simple B&W bitmap in ecosystems density channel [1], I set "Avoid overlaping instances" [2] to not get a man pass through another, and I set "Decay near foreign objects" [3] in order to not have men colliding with a carriage for example. Then I adjusted density.

Initially I planed for this scene numerous horse driven carriages, so I needed a lot of horses that should look different. So I prepared a multi material for Poser Horse. (This simple horse is also much better than polygon heavy Millennium Horse) The same trick was done for character's clothing - all characters clothes use the same material, but it has some variations depending on object's position, so it creates an impression that people wear different clothes. Below is explanation of multicoloured material function: First you need the object centre node that you link to a noise node - it will produce random values for each object placed in differnt location, then I filter those random values to reduce variations from [-1,1] range to something around [-0.1,0,1]. Reduction of signal range is necessary as I need just very slight variations of color. The signal from filters is linked to color correction HLS node that varies Hue Luminosity and Saturation. If I haven't use filters I would get full scale variations and by consequence green, violet and yellow horses.

On this scene Martians are hunting people, grapping them with tentacles and putting them into baskets. Basket models uses 3D modeled thick bars and small size framework is simulated with a simple texture involving blurred bars for bumps channel and solid bars for transparency channel :

To properly position a character in Martian tentacle I exported the tentacle into the Poser, positioned the character, and imported whole set (character + tentacle into Vue) I made the same to properly pose characters inside cars.

I added 3 cars to the scene, however it is not very accurate - although these cars existed at the dawn of XX century, but were a very rare sight. So it was rather improbable to spot 3 cars on the same street - but who cares? It was even less probable to spot 2 Marian War Machines hunting people. ;-) For the scene I used an excellent Renault G from 1901 modeled by Bernard Dumas

As well as 2 other cars from 500 3D Objects Encyclopedia

I needed some London landmark - but as it was intended to be in background I made a simple model of Big Ben and applied on it a photo texture. It looks perfect despite that it is very simple model ! 3D is based on illusion - you can get much better results applying a good quality photographic texture on a low poly model than building a high definition model with lame materials.

When I found an excellent bridge model (by narwik) on Turbo Squid, I wanted to put a speeding burning train on it, but lately I resigned - I was afraid to overload the scene, however I kept the bridge in the scene.

It may be surprising but whole scene uses just one light - distant light (sun) and radiosity lighting with HDRI bitmap applied the sky. So lighting is very natural - no cheating with additional light sources. Below you will find settings I used for the atmosphere: First I defined a Environement mapping lighting model using a HDRI bitmap, but this bitmap served only for ambient lighting, for the sky visible in the scene I used a separate bitmap. When you are setting a HDRI map, you should position main lightsource (Sun) at the same place the sun is on HDRI map. It will produce the most realistic lighting effects. Just move the sun and/or play with HDRI Map offset UV settings

Then I switched on global radiosity and I set quality to -1 [1]. Such lower quality produces good looking shadows while used with Superior rendering mode, and rendering time is not very long. Often with radiosity lighting it is necessary to increase sky dome lighting [2] and to boost sunlight intensity [3]

To get proper fog I had to experiment a little - I did it on a "mockup scene" without final objects just with a couple cubes placed instead of mine buildings, so rendering was swift.

As I already mentioned, I used a separate bitmap for the sky - HDRI bitmap is great to light your scene but often its resolution is too low to properly render the sky. So to get sharp detailled sky I used an alphaplane arthogonal to the camera axe with a picture composed from numerous photographs of smoke and clouds. There were some blank areas, but I did not care, as they would be masked by buildings on final scene.

Below are settings for sky alphaplane material. I switched off shadows and lighting, and boosted luminous to 125%.

 

This article describe just a small part of work that was involved in building this scene. I hope you will profit from some ideas mentioned above while designing your 3D scenes. May the creativity be with you :-)