I just downloaded the free Dystopia City Blocks 011-020. How do you go about in creating a night scene, with the windows lit up?

There's an option for making the windows glow but in the absence of that, set the window material to Ambient white, value 1.

There should also be presets in the mat library. I have used this set several times.

What version of Poser are you using?

Here are the city blocks, night sky for the dome and night lights set on the blocks. All selected in the mat room. (PP11, Superfly: rought render for this test) infinite light set at .2.

I'm using Poser 2014. The ambient setting works. However when I exported it into 3DS Max 2016, I had to detach the windows and apply A nighttime lit windows illumination map. Thanks for the input everybody. I'm trying to give the Max scene a dramatic low angle Gotham City look.(with a bit of foggy light pollution)

There was an Ambient map for the windows for just such a purpose. It is black with little white rectangles on it. It should be in the texture folder for the set. If there is no preset for it, but the map exists, just apply it to the ambient channel for the windows.

The set has undergone several versions over the years, so I don't know if the map is in the one you have or not.

Quick night time render (Iray) with the ambient maps in place on one of the blocks.

My copy of Dystopia has a discriminator map, but it looks like it is used to control what part of the window sections are reflective (glass parts), versus what is diffuse only (concrete) and what might have weaker specular (metal window framing).
Anyway, that B&W map controlling the reflections works. Here are two Superfly renders:

I made no effort to adapt the non-glowy materials for Superfly. I made an MC6 which will set up the windows, lamps, LEDs, and beacons for Superfly. It can be applied to any/all Dystopia blocks. I'll get that packed and posted as a freebie.

For Firefly, I would select/duplicate the glowy bits (windows, lamps, LEDs, beacons) as an unseen IDL emitter. Oh, belatedly, I see the reference to low fog. BB showed how to do that in one of these threads - if the forum upgrades haven't deleted it.

Oh, I just love the Dystopia city blocks. (I love Greebles in general). They stand up very well to being resized, and I have used them as backgrounds for character renders -- though to do that, some higher res textures are needed.

I wanted to do a night scene, and I wasn't happy with how they looked. I had to change the UV mapping on the windows because the way it's set up by default creates extremely tiny tiles, and I needed much bigger ones. But once I'd done that, added some new tiling textures, and set up my ambient lighting, they look pretty good at night, I think.

With Ian Palmer's Instant City -- which I also retextured -- and Dystopian blocks 1-20, it makes for a decently wide and big night skyline.

And here's a street view. I just need some lo poly traffic -- with headlights. :)

Moriador, what block has the violet billboard and teardrop streetlights? It has blue vertical panels, too; not sure if those are billboards or windows viewed from a distance.

That's block 5. The colored ambient parts are material zones called "Features". I boosted the ambient on them to make them out like super neon lights. They would be better as actual billboards with glowing text/images -- you're right. The way I set up the windows was to UV map them for larger tiling textures, and then used either actual photos of night windows on high rises or filter forged glowing skyscraper windows. Plus a reflective surface on many of them. So the windows in my scheme look like... well... windows. At least, that was the intent. :D

I intended to kit bash a whole bunch of signage from other sets to put on the buildings. And I was working on streams of lo poly traffic with head, rear, and side lights. But I never got around to it. LOL.

Ah, I saw "feature" through "feature4" on several blocks. I'll have to look at some of them, extract OBJs to get a look at UV mapping, and figure out if it would be feasible to make one overall MAT. If not, it might still be worthwhile to make some block-specific signage MATs. I really like your idea of using those mat zones for neon signage. :D

So far, I have a universal MAT for LED green, LED red, lamps, beacon, window A, window B, window C, plus a dull transparent glow for "void" (parking garages) and a disappearing material for the "ground base" to let my own asphalt show through.
I also have automatically animated textures for the LEDs and beacons, so that the LEDs pulse (brighten... dim... brighten... dim..) and the beacons strobe (flash-flash-flash-pause... flash-flash-flash-pause...). For neon signs, UV mapping permitting, I could set up animated theatre crawler effects.

Moriador, the more I look at your Dystopia renders, the more I like your office window texturing. :D

I'm going to try your office window method smooshed together with the LightPath ambient boost effect, and see what results.

I also liked your idea of making that feature area of block 05 into neon signage. I looked at the UV mapping; it's good for the stock patterned concrete texture, but not for signage. I made overlay props for that curved section with signage-friendly UV mapping. I envision a text crawler strip at top, another text crawler at bottom, and cover the big curved window area with an advertising jumbotron LCD TV. I'll get that started rendering before going to bed, and post the results tomorrow.

Here's the result:

Closer, to show the advertising jumbotron and the text crawler marquees:

I can make a MAT to apply to any of the Dystopia blocks; the jumbotron and text crawler marquees will need to be props parented to block 05.

Cool! I love the signage there. Animated textures sound like a real treat too. It amazes me how well these sets hold up to close-up renders. I'm seriously tempted to take another look at the rest of the series over at Daz. :)

Made some adjustments to the Dystopia materials, including adding identifier names to some nodes to help with understanding what each node is doing, consolidating some nodes to make it easier to adjust animation speed, adjust color, adjust amount of lightcasting boost, etc.

I'm also updating the P9 animated light emitters I made for John Hoagland's Viper MkII. The Dystopia Superfly MAT pack and the updated Viper add-on pack will both be freebies. The engine thrust streams, the wingtip navigation lights, the cockpit dash, and the cockpit DRADIS monitor are all animated lightcasters. I'm working on setting up a brief proof-of-concept animated scene. Test still renders:

I'm glad to have Queue Manager to network this out - a "proof of concept" Superfly animation, showing animated mesh light materials.

I can't post an AVI or SWF directly, and Photobucket crushed the AVI (and no longer hosts SWF), so all I can do is give a dropbox download link (9.21MB AVI):

Superfly animated meshlight demo

Some really interesting ideas here - I never got the night versions to look this good !

moriador posted at 10:30AM Fri, 08 April 2016 - #4263131

Oh, I just love the Dystopia city blocks. (I love Greebles in general). They stand up very well to being resized, and I have used them as backgrounds for character renders -- though to do that, some higher res textures are needed.

I wanted to do a night scene, and I wasn't happy with how they looked. I had to change the UV mapping on the windows because the way it's set up by default creates extremely tiny tiles, and I needed much bigger ones. But once I'd done that, added some new tiling textures, and set up my ambient lighting, they look pretty good at night, I think....

Moriador: any idea what's causing the slightly lighter large bluish rectangles on the images in that post (red arrows on the image below point to the top right corners)

seachnasaigh posted at 10:41AM Fri, 08 April 2016 - #4263415

Moriador, the more I look at your Dystopia renders, the more I like your office window texturing. :D

I'm going to try your office window method smooshed together with the LightPath ambient boost effect, and see what results.

I also liked your idea of making that feature area of block 05 into neon signage. I looked at the UV mapping; it's good for the stock patterned concrete texture, but not for signage. I made overlay props for that curved section with signage-friendly UV mapping. I envision a text crawler strip at top, another text crawler at bottom, and cover the big curved window area with an advertising jumbotron LCD TV. I'll get that started rendering before going to bed, and post the results tomorrow.

seachnasaigh: I assume the "Lightpath ambient boost" is a Superfly thing?

3DCheapskate: If I understand correctly what's puzzling you, the bright blocks are the "lit up" windows, and the bluish areas are areas of glass where the lights are off, so those areas are simply reflective mirrors, and you're seeing the blue-grey skydome reflected in the "off" areas of glass.

One of Moriador's renders shows that more than the other because of camera angle; the shot with the camera down low shows the sky reflected.

Which windows are lit up and which are off is controlled by a B&W tile map; there are three in the Dystopia texture folder. You could increase/decrease that distribution by using two of those B&W maps with math nodes - multiply the maps to reduce windows "on" (logical "and"), or add them (then clamp) to increase the number of windows "on" (logical "or").

The LightPath ambient boost technique is indeed a Superfly thing. I can get the same appearance for the windows themselves in Firefly, but I can only get the strong lightcasting in Firefly if I add unseen mesh pieces. Superfly can make the original props do their own lightcasting, and does it easily.

Superfly kit for Dystopia city blocks has been uploaded to ShareCG. It has Superfly MT5s and MC6s, plus an add-on prop set (Jumbotron, text crawler marquees, etc) for block 05.

Superfly kit for Viper MkII has been uploaded to ShareCG. This is a rough daylight Superfly render with the Viper sitting on the asphalt, to show the light casting.

Here's a 19.3MB SWF Viper animation demo, if you want to see what it does.