How to Build a Melancholic Environment of a City at Night with Blender

Introduction

Hi, my name is Vitaly. Three years ago, my friend sent me a video with work for a 3D challenge from Pwnisher. I watched it several times in a row, it impressed me a lot, and I thought I wanted to try to learn something similar and get at least a little closer to that level. Since then, I've been studying 3D graphics, first hard-surface modeling, then sculpting, and now I'm focusing on creating short animated atmospheric scenes.

About six months ago, I came across Roderick Porter's track "Ghost" (feat. Ivri), and I really liked it. In general, I've always liked sad, melancholic music like Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, and this time was no exception. An image of a quiet street in a city at night instantly popped into my head, which later developed into the work When the Lights Are On.

First and foremost, it was important for me to convey the melancholic atmosphere and mood of the night city that would match the music I have chosen. At the same time, I wanted to move away from PBR textures to make the work look stylized. Soon, I started collecting references, looking for photos and stylized images of night streets, researching the colors and shades of the night.  

One interesting thing to make my work more realistic, I opened the game "Spider-Man", flew through the streets of New York, and took screenshots of objects and compositional solutions that I liked.

When the Lights Are On

For the composition, I used the basic rule of thirds, as well as elements of aerial perspective. As for modeling, it is not the most important part of my work. I used standard hard-surface techniques, and to save time, I took some ready-made models from stock. I spent most of my time adjusting the lighting and assembling shaders.

Similar to modeling, I followed a standard approach for creating UVs and used Blender's built-in tools. Fortunately, cell-shaded textures do not require high-quality UVs. Texturing was both the most interesting and the most difficult part of this work for me. I spent a lot of time experimenting with different types of textures: BBR, hand-painting, cell-shading, and other combinations of them.

In the end, I settled on a unique combination of a procedural cell-shading approach with elements of hand-painted textures. It was essential for me to maintain the stylized look of cell-shading, but at the same time, I wanted to incorporate details that would lend the work a sense of realism.

Most scene shaders are based on an adaptive version of cell-shading, which, unlike the basic version (shader to RGB and color ramp), reacts to light sources and allows for more convenient adjustment of value and hue for different objects. To diversify the color and give the textures a paint look, I used combinations of different Noise Maps.

Texturing

Hand-painted details were added to some foreground objects to give the textures even more variety. An interesting fact, on the wall of the service exit on the roof, it says "Isn't life beautiful?", which is a reference to Lil Peep's track "Life Is Beautiful". 

Another difficulty in working with this type of texture was that for each object, in addition to hue, it was necessary to manually set the value, which is separate from other color parameters and is adjusted using a color ramp.

Lighting

For the light coming from the windows, I used standard emission combined with a stretched noise texture, which allowed me to simulate the uneven lighting in the rooms.

For the skyscraper windows in the background, I used ready-made textures of city lights connected to emission.

Before I started working on the shaders, I created night lighting to better understand how they would look. I used sky texture and sunlight for moonlight, as well as spot lights for streetlights. At the same time, I added fog using volume scatter, which greatly transformed my scene and made it even more atmospheric.

After adjusting the lighting and shaders to bring my city to life, I started working on the animations. I added animations for cars, girls, and various light sources in the city.

Next, it was time for compositing. Using the mist channel mask, I adjusted the density of the fog and added a Kuwahara node in combination with a filter (diamond sharpen) to make my work even more stylized.

As a final detail and to give the scene a finished, stylized look, I added an outline using Grease Pencil Line Art. That completed the work in Blender, and I moved on to Premiere Pro, where I added to the atmosphere with city sounds and, of course, the track that started it all. I also did some minor color correction and added visual noise effects to certain parts of the song.

Conclusion

In total, it took me about 50 hours to complete the scene. Since I had never tried combining procedural cell-shading and hand-painting approaches before, this was the most difficult part for me. I spent a lot of time playing with nodes, adjusting and selecting shaders that would fit harmoniously into the atmosphere of the night city.

For those who are just starting their journey in 3D, I would advise always planning all stages of work carefully and in advance, as this will save a lot of time and prevent you from getting distracted.

Vitaliy Novart, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine