hi all,
was wanting to know the best way to get a cityscape of bulding models to look fairly realistic for a night scene.

specifically i wanted to get some windows lit randomly and not uniform, similar to reality.

how would i best go about achieving this. am trying to create a nice gotham city type scene at night as viewed from a rooftop of one of the buildings.

cheers,
matt

My usual method for making a night sky line is to first create some basic building shapes
There are a couple of ways to do this:

1. Use basic primitives.
2. You can use a regular terrain that you first flattened by reseting it and then apply a function by going to Apply function and selecting the basic noise flat function with an amplitude of 30 for low rise buildings or 100 for high rise.  You can stretch your building upwards to make your buildings taller.
3. Import a model of a building

Now have a look at the materials in the Special Effects -> Buildings category that come with Vue?  I find these can produce quite effective buildings.

Finally I'll set up a night time atmosphere to set the whole scene off.

Hope that helps

thanx impish, that sounds very do-able and logical. i appreciate it.

In case its of any use I posted a freebie tower I made for a night scene to my blog a few days ago:
impworks.blogspot.com/2007/06/free-tower-model-for-vue-6.html

..oops wrong file.Here ya go,just raname it from .jpg to .vob(;

how does your open gl view have that much detail? i have such a hard time seeing big features in the terrians without rendering or waiting for a preview.

Do you have Poser?  if yes, don't forget the Dystopia blocks available at DAZ3d.  The first 20 buildings are free - they make a great eco-system. 

Several of the Dystopia blocks are available as vob files from Cornucopia 3d  which avoids the need for poser.

Right!  I never have the patience to wait for a Vue version....  Always end up buying the Poser stuff and converting.  Block 91 to 100 has finally been released!!

Right!  I never have the patience to wait for a Vue version....  Always end up buying the Poser stuff and converting.  Block 91 to 100 has finally been released!!