Creating Cityscapes in 3ds Max

Learn to design and model a city from almost any era, with Illustrator (or any other vector drawing program) and 3ds Max.

Learn to design and model a city from almost any era, in Autodesk 3ds Max. After assessing the conditions, architecture, and boundaries of the city, Adam Crespi diagrams its evolution, ensuring the digital cityscape exhibits a growth pattern and layout like any of its real-world counterparts. Then he designs the basic structure and components of the city in Adobe Illustrator, generating reusable symbols to represent trees, lights, and buildings. With the plan in hand, Adam dives into 3ds Max, creating Proxy objects as he lays out the city to scale. Each element is then set up as a reference object and duplicated throughout the scene, using containers, Alembic caches, and mental ray Proxy objects. The final chapter shows you how to add skies and other matte-painting backgrounds to your views, and includes a real-world example of cityscape modeling with a moving camera: a project simulating the movement of a crane on a studio backlot.