Here is an example for lighted streets at night. I used a street layout generated with the "Modern Streets" rules in a completely dark Vue scene. Please note that I did not deal with lights for the cars yet and there are no houses in this scene. The modern streets rules are great. You can generate varying amounts of traffic, pedestrians, etc. very easily.

I generated a luminosity mask for the lights and used it to generate the "glow" for the lights. However, this is not enough to light the scene (even with high radiosity gain). Hence I set up a spot light for one of the lights (large angle, very soft, 5% power) and the copied it by ALT-drag to the other lights. This works quite well in a small to medium scene. It would very tedious in a large city... I will try a large city next and most likely fake the lights by using luminosity and ambient light. More later.

Ciao

TD