Not really a tutorial, more like showing you how I do things. With this kind of huge scifi cityscape, I generally just keep chucking things on, arranging and duplicating them till it looks good or till my pc starts to die and I have to stop:biggrin: The most taxing part of making this was all the "trees", or green spheres as they actually are. There is 1167 which had to be moved and "landed down" in small groups, from experiance I have learnt that while you can select that many spheres at one time easily enough, dont try to "land " them in one go:rolleyes:

Here´s the camera view wireframe. 

Here´s a top view, it wont zoom out anymore so it doesnt quite fit on the screen! Acheiving a real feel of distance is easy, just put things really far away from the camera!!

This is the jpeg I used for all the terrain buildings, duplicated 67 times. Remember the ones close to the camera should be at least "ultra-fine", although "massive" or "gigantic" is better, makes them much sharper. Terrains really far from the camera you can get away with "normal", saves alot of polygons!

The mat settings for the buildings.  I mainly get my picture textures from 3Dworld, Advanced Photoshop or ImagineFX dvd´s. Or I take them myself(mostly rocks and grounds).

More building mats! Giving slight variations in your building mats stops your terrain buildings from looking too similar, especially if your lazy like me and used the same jpeg for all the terrain buildings.

The mat for the sphere "trees".

The mat for the parkland.

I knew I wanted loads of ships flying around in this scene, but my machine was starting to get sluggish, so I used this simple jpeg on a sym lattice set to "very coarse". Looks okay at a distance.

Pretty much everything I create I save to my object library, so I have loads of scifi stuff that can be recycled as ships, buildings, mechanical stuff etc.

So there you go, a quick peek into my "creative process", thanks for looking!  

Thanks so much - very helpful!  Many good ideas here.   Another biscuit for you!

Thanks for the trip into your creative mind,and an excellent scene to be inspired by!

Excellent stuff Lown, and thanks very much for allowing us a peak into your work; very enlightning mate.

Wow! That is extensive. It has giving me some good ideas.Thanks.