Metropolitan 3D City Tutorial

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here and welcome to another very exciting tutorial today we'll be taking a look at the metropolitan pack from Video Copilot now this pack features 3d buildings skyscrapers industrial buildings offices and just a bunch of cool buildings to populate your own little city so today I'm going to take you through the pack show you what's included how to use it and just some general tips and tricks now if you haven't seen the demo video already let me just show you a few things that were created using this pack all right so those are some of the things that you can create we're gonna go ahead and take a look at the tools so let's create a new composition and hit OK and then when it create a new solid and hit OK then over in the effects and presets I've already typed an element that's going to save us a lot of time and we're going to drop it on to our lair so I've already installed the Metropolitan pack and when you install it it'll become available to element so we're going to launch the scene setup so here's element I've adjusted the panels a little bit specifically for this demo and first thing we come over to the model browser and by the way to get it to be horizontal you can change this to be a vertical browser divider so if you want to move it over here and to move the panels just drag the names and you can move them around so I'm going to scroll down here to the metropolitan pack and there's three subfolders we have graphic buildings metropolitan and metropolitan no antennas so the graphics buildings these are very basic buildings these are meant for you know like a motion graphic city you know one that's not heavily detailed but you know has a cool stylistic look so those are very cool but the key to metropolitan is the metropolitan building so let's click on that and here we can go through and see all of the different buildings that are included so there's some tall buildings some apartment buildings there's some shorter buildings even some industrial looking buildings you know like these flat sort of you know warehouse types and then we have some offices and some skyscrapers and then we also have the street layouts and we'll talk about those a little bit more as well as the street layouts without any building so you can use those to you know tile your own little city area now below the Metropolitan is the Metropolitan no antenna so just to get this out of the way it's exactly the same as the Metropolitan it's just all of the antennas on the buildings and some of the details have been disabled specifically to make the objects load a lot faster so if you have a really low end graphics card you might consider trying these buildings out because think about like an antenna array some of the antennas are so heavily detailed that they're actually more polygons than the actual building itself so just keep that in mind and not to mention it's good even if you have a great graphics card to use these ones for further away buildings so that you're not you know wasting polygons on you know far outside buildings so that's the only difference so here's how this works every building has a day version and a night version and the main difference is the night version has illuminated windows which actually light up so if we change the lighting setup and maybe turn the brightness down you can actually see the illumination on these windows now I'm going to go ahead and disable draft textures just so we can really see some of the the detail here and like I said these these antenna arrays are very high poly so we look at the wireframe view here you know some nice some nice detail for sure all right so you can just click on the different buildings I'm going to just hide the info there and and check them out so we've just put a lot of detail into these there's a you know rooftop details from you know air conditioning to pipes helicopter landing pads just a lot of fun stuff so when you're creating those sort of aerial shots you see a lot of this specific detail now we've added a couple of specific buildings like the Empire State Building probably just for fun I'm not you know I'm not sure this one fits very well into a lot of skylines that don't look exactly like New York City but it's a it's a cool building for sure and you know somebody can use it for something we can only help the industrial buildings these are very cool these are these buildings are meant to be sort of on the outskirts of the city and going through a little bit more we've got these industrial buildings these are really cool sort of these flat you know warehouses and such and you can just go through and try out the different models you know you can check them out zoom into them you can play around with the lighting you can even change the environment reflection map so for example a building like this that has a lot of Windows I might actually click on the environment and instead of using sort of a blurry looking environment map don't get me wrong these are great for a lot of things but for buildings that are so large you want the detail to be fairly sharp so we've included some additional maps some 4k maps that you can use that look a little bit strange but when you see them reflected you can actually see some of the building details so these are great for just giving more realistic reflections on any given building we can take a look at the different materials that are set up so you've got things like satellite dishes antennas lights and then you have the skyscraper itself here so if you want to change the skyscraper material you can go in there and make some adjustments so maybe you want a darker building you know whatever you need but let's say you want to get rid of an antenna or something what you can do is shut off some of these materials that make up some of these specific features so you can see some of these antennas can just be shut off directly and you know you can change the building around to you know fit your specific needs like if you wanted to put a title on here and a particular antenna was in the way we've separated it so that you can go in and turn that off alright so now that we've gone through the basic idea of this pack let's take a look at building a mini city so the first thing you want to do is go through and pick a few buildings so we'll just go through we'll click on a few here we've got the apartment maybe this building 3 come down a little bit more building 4 see I was like this office building and office 4 is cool skyscraper 3 and maybe one more about skyscraper - so you really want about you know six or seven different buildings and we can collapse all the materials so that we can just see him real quick and usually you know you can make this fullscreen so you don't have to work in a really small area so we've picked all of our buildings and they're all on Group one so I'm going to hit OK and then I'm going to create a new camera we're going to call this Skycam because if I were in a helicopter that's the name it would be and we're going to pull back here and take a look so by default element has a single particle visible so what I want to do is go into the particle replicator and change it from a point to a plane and then I'm going to increase the particle count to say 50 and slowly move up from there element 3d was designed to work with this pack one of the things we did was we looked into ways to actually randomize buildings but keeping them perpendicular in other words rotating them only 90 degrees but randomly so we implemented a feature if we go down to the particle look rotation so rotation random is cool but that's going to be one funky City I mean think about how bad the directions will be on Apple Maps dump dump done we're worried okay so rotation random doesn't work but we have another feature called randomized angle so what we can do is we can type in a specific angle and it will randomize that value in those multipliers so what I want to do is set the Y rotation to 90 degrees so what that's going to do is rotate the buildings so that some of them are randomly rotated 90 degrees and some of them are not so if we look at these two buildings they're the same building but this one's rotated this way and this one's rotated this way so what that does is as just much more randomization to our buildings because now not even the same building is rotated the same nearby so we can also play around with some more randomization so that's kind of the first thing we want to do randomize the angle then do a little bit of random size we just turn up the size random here and we can start adding a few more buildings fill this place up okay so now we're going to set up some lighting so I'm going to go ahead create a new light and we'll make a parallel light at about 150 and hit OK and we basically want to create sort of a light coming from above yeah and then we're going to create another light it's going to be an ambient light this is sort of our neutral light now depending on the color that we want our scene to look we want to use that color in the ambient light so if we want to kind of a daytime warm scene we want to try to use the color in the light and we can even get a little bit darker too yeah we can also take the top light here at the parallel light and give it a little bit of warmth as well okay so this is a pretty good a pretty good start now metropolitan comes with a few city background skylines and what we can do is just take a look at those basically just some generic distant buildings with a nice sky so we can take that drop it into the bottom of the scene make it a 3d layer and hit AAA and what we want to do is turn except lights off and that way it'll just stay true to its own color we'll hit V and push this off into the distance and then turn it up alright so there we go now we've got this nice bright sky and so I'm thinking that maybe our parallel light should be a bit brighter maybe a little less ambient light you know once you get that background in place you can really start seeing you know where your lighting should be coming from and and how bright it should be so that's pretty good alright so next thing I want to do is go back into the element layer and we're going to come down here to ambient occlusion we're going to turn this on and this is just going to add some shading to our buildings now I like to turn the depth influence down to like 20 when I'm using a city building since everything is pretty far away and then turn up the the radius and the darkness a little bit cool now thing about doing cities one of the most important things is creating fog and fall-off that goes off into the distance so right now our size is pretty small we're gonna actually let's increase it a bit and even add more buildings this place is just kidding build in so here we go all right and when it come down here to the render settings and we're gonna close the ambient occlusion and we're going to open up the fog so I'm going to turn it on and then we're going to take the color of sort of this background blue let's see let's try that again yes and let's turn the range down so the way this works is you change the start distance and it's going to change the fog position now I always like to have a little bit of fog and if we click on the color we can go ahead and tweak this to try to match our horizon line so we want to try to match where our fake buildings end and the real buildings of the image begin so we want to try to see if we can match it you know pretty close all right so this is looking really good you know we could do some cool stuff right now we could do some titles you know whatever now what I like to do is add a second dimension of buildings and the way to do that is to select the element layer go back into the scene and we're going to take all of our buildings and we're going to apply them to Group one and group two so I'm just going to click click click click and click click there we go then we're gonna hit OK and we're going to come down to group one and one of the cool features is you can copy all of the settings and then paste them into another group so now we've made it an exact copy but instead of having the same amount of particles I want it to be just about 25 then we're going to go to let's see the size or and turn this up yes so these are like the big large buildings now some of these buildings like this office building maybe it's a little bit too wide to be a tall building so what we could do is we could go through if you just use the up and down arrows and say you know what this building isn't quite make sense let's just not have it be in group 2 and then maybe just come back over here to the metro pack find a nice tall sky scraper maybe you know this guy and set that to channel 2 group 2 by itself then we hit okay so that way we're you know adding enough you know repetition without having you know unusual sized buildings now the other thing in the replicator is we can bring the size in so we don't have to have the buildings be so far away we can create sort of a downtown look and maybe even lessen the amount of buildings and to randomize it further just play around with a random seed so just you tweak this let's just create a new adjustment layer like to do that and we're going to add a curves adjustment and let's just add some contrast here I'll go half row so that doesn't look so messed up and maybe our fog should be a little bit lighter so after you do a little color correction and you know make some adjustments as well now if we wanted to we could maybe add some glow we could do a a glow over the the highlight area or I just like to make it nice and wide and turn it down like you don't want this to be too intense and remember we can color correct this background plate it's a separate layer we could just you know we could bring the highlights down but keep those sort of bluer buildings so now feel free to mix it up just to get the look that you want I'm going to take the text tool here and we're going to add a title so we're just going to type Metro and in the same instance of element we're going to go down to the custom layers and select the Metro text and we'll just shut that off and jump back into the scene setup so I'm going to try to show you a whole you know routine of what you could do so we're going to open up the extrude and there it is now it's got a little spike coming off it that's okay spike filter so if we just crank that up it's gone now another thing we have is 0 real estate I go to the bevels we can actually go down maybe find a nice bevel I like to do something pretty simple this one looks pretty nice let's just go back to default lighting and maybe take this background color and darken it a little bit more and maybe make this front a little bit lighter we go and depending on how long your text is you can always play around with this a bevel scale to just find the right balance now our buildings are currently on Group one and group two so let's put this on group three now if you hold down alt and click it it'll switch it to that group instead of at the same time so alt will swap it alright we'll hit OK now on group three we need to scale up our text and then move it up there is that funny how like when you have something big like a building that it instantly gives text you know this massive scale you know it's like it's all relative like you could have a title that's fills your screen but if it doesn't have something relative to it you know it'll just look like a big title but here you actually have some you know this cool like mass to it so let's let's maybe pull it forward in front of that building right there cool so now with the camera our skycam we could hit PA key frames and then you know part of the trike gears we could you know we can move up to make it visible we could just put some more color correction on top of this maybe you know bring some of this green back into it alright so this is looking pretty good we could just make some changes to our text and you know we are in business or in business you know I can move around that that object so that it's closer or further away I can even change the position of some of these buildings I mean this one's like intersecting anyway I should probably at least scale it up so that it blocks the other building yeah and that's really the beauty of this pack and element 3d is that we get to see this in practically real-time you know we can move things around we can make adjustments to lights and get instant feedback so we can really refine it and you know get it to look great now there's one more thing I want to show you we're going to come over here and just start fresh with an element copy on a solid I want to jump into the scene setup and we're going to come down here to metropolitan now I'm going to click on the metropolitan folder and we're going to scroll down and we have these city blocks or these Street layouts now be careful they do load a lot of textures all at once if you do click on them and make sure you're using element version 1.5 so I'm going to click on 1 these here street layout six at night so what's cool about these is they have buildings and if you get close enough let's see here you can see there's little street lights and crosswalks and stuff like that so there's some fun details on these and you know we could cheat night light here by just darkening this down a bit so pretty cool so let me hit okay so I've got the one city block here now I want to go ahead and extend it so there's a few more blocks so what we can do is just like before we go to the particle replicator set it to a plane and we want to set this to a square number so let's set this to something like 16 so then if we increase the scale we can actually get these to align perfectly so you can see that they're lining up here now if you hold down control you can refine this so that it goes together perfectly and these are meant to all tile so that they can be extended now the one problem here is that they look pretty repetitive so we're going to use that same randomize angle trick go to the particle look rotation randomize angle 90 and there we go if sort of randomized it if we come down in here again we have a little bit more latitude as far as where we can go so we could do things first of all we could play around with maybe some of the glow in the windows we could go down to the render settings for glow and turn that on and maybe tint the windows tend to glow more Orange you know we could play around with the you know the light position and things like that to give it a nice sort of moonlight look so anyways there's obviously unlimited combinations that you could do you could mix buildings together or you could add a specific building so one thing to think about just like we placed that city text right there we could place one specific building there so we could take one building on group four and put it right there so really think about how you can take advantage of the five groups and use some as replicators and use others to place specific things all right well be sure to upgrade to element 3d 1.5 it's got some great features for the building pack as well as some optimized textures so that it loads really fast and be sure to check out the pack it's our biggest pack yet it's you know it's over a gigabyte of stuff of textures you know if you think about each one of these buildings you know just to brag a little bit if you think about any one of these textured buildings not only do you have the skyscraper which has a diffuse specular reflection and a bump map but you've also got the roof elements the satellite dishes the LED lights you know plus the illumination map so you know we've really spent a lot of time let me crank those up we really spend a lot of time trying to make these as realistic as possible so that you know you guys cannot can use these and don't forget all of the buildings are available in cinema 4d 3d max with v-ray FBX obj quads so all the other 3d formats that you might need for Maya or otherwise all of those files are available to download as well and they're all textured ready to anyways my name is Andrew Kramer thank you guys for watching and we will see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 272,819

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Id: VLjfCHsZuPw

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 22 2013