City of tomorrow - 3d animation

This is my entry (WIP) for the 2021 CGarchitect contest.?

To speed up the set dressing I’ve used Twinmotion. Compared to Unreal Engine there are some drawbacks. In Twinmotion you can do only simple animations, it lacks advanced material editing, advanced lighting and the list goes on. So you have to compare what creative freedom you lose vs. speed. You can export the scene from Twinmotion to Unreal via the Datasmith plugin, and I might do that later on.

The eVtol was modeled and textured by me based on blueprints from Joby eVtol. The ones I've found were a bit low res. but they have really good photos. I really liked the tiltrotor idea which is similar to the V-22 Osprey. The base model is 5.8 k polys and the subdivided one is 12.9k. I wanted to finish fast the tiltrotor mechanism, so it's just a cylinder with extrudes and bevels - not quite realistic but does the job. For UV unwrapping I've used seems to separate wing and tail from the fuselage and for the top and bottom parts. Because of the time constraints, I've UV unwrapped just half of the aircraft and I've used a symmetry modifier. Aircraft marking is MV 111 (from my name), so it behaves nicely when it's mirrored. For texturing I’ve used PBR materials. I’ve prepared base color (diffuse), transparency, roughness, metallic, reflection and normal maps for the model.

Unfortunately, Twinmotion behaves poorly with transparent materials when using opacity maps. It only likes opaque or fully transparent and It doesn`t like degrees of transparency from materials. So I had to make a separate mesh for the cockpit with transparent material - in my first version I had a single mesh. In this case, it creates an undesirable Moire effect - you can see it in the spinning propellers (fix in my ToDo list for the next version) - Twinmotion bug.

My time for modeling was consumed by the aircraft so for the buildings, I had to rely on Sketchup Warehouse. I've wanted buildings with green roofs in the foreground, something to remind us of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The close one was textured and set dressed in Twinmotion by me. I had to clean it up in Sketchup of unneeded objects and use specific materials which were replaced in Twinmotion. After this, I've used it as an instance 5 times to fill the scene.

I’ve used a lot of instances for buildings and trees, considering that is a large scene, like this I’ve managed to fit my file in 8GB VRAM from my Nvidia 1080. The background city is kitbashed with just a few building models used in various scales and rotations.

To manage texture resources I advise you to take a look at Unreal Engine documentation to understand the space required in VRAM (GPU RAM) https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Textures/SupportAndSettings/ A 2K resolution (2048 x*2048) texture occupies 2.6MB and a 4K one 10.6MB. In my case, I've used only 2K and 1K textures.

As you can see from the task manager, I've used 7.5 GB of VRAM (from 8 available) during rendering, so I had to be cautious. My (older) i7 4790k CPU wasn't so busy - not too many draw calls.

Unfortunately no RTX GPU so some reflections are a bit strange, even that I've used reflection probes. I have to dig deeper, maybe I'll find a fix so the reflections will look better.

For rendering, I’ve used the skylight and some additional lights to fill in some shadows. As a photographer, I really like the golden hour so I’ve used it with some rotation for the sun until the shadows looked nice.

The scene started as an idea for the Redesign the World contest. It first started as a sketch by me for the final frame. I wanted a city that is green energy efficient, with a lot of photovoltaic and low-speed wind power turbines. After researching references I’ve made a screenplay. It was a lot longer because it had details about agriculture, energy and ocean life. Some of them got into this scene. Maybe I’ll include the rest of the screenplay in the movie if the time permits. In my to-do list for this scene, there are some things that need some enhancements, like the spinning propeller texture that behaves strangely in Twinmotion - see transparent textures bug.

A brief description of my entry for Redesign the World contest:

• A city of tomorrow that is energy efficient, with a lot of photovoltaic and low-speed wind power turbines and many green roofs.
• The transportation system is based on electricity including cars, trains, eVTOL aircraft, and marine transportation.?
• Agriculture is done in vertical greenhouses and Agroforestry in open fields surrounded by Windbreak forests. Plant surveillance is done by drones to check health, the level of water, and nutrients.
• Ocean shores are used by wind and waves power stations that take into account marine life. Controlled fish harvesting without affecting the aquatic species.
• Subterrain it's all about heat control, providing warm water for the city's power and heating.

It took me around 50 hours to finish the scene and this included:

• 3d modeling, UV unwrapping and texturing the aircraft;
• cleaning Sketchup models (buildings) and?assigning unique basic textures;
• set dressing and assigning new materials in Twinmotion;
• animation and final rendering.