Post Apocalyptic City

My 3D Environments usually consist of nature but for this piece I wanted to step out of my comfort zone.

The original idea was to create a city environment but after watching The Last Of Us, that idea evolved into a post apocalyptic city.

For this scene to be even remotely usable in the viewport due to the amount of polygons, I had come up with the idea to wrap high poly objects in a cube to approximately match the bounds, then parent the high poly mesh to the bounds cube, hide the high poly mesh in the viewport and hide the bounds cube in the final render. Additionally the foliage was possible by using the Gscatter addon which had a few neat settings like camera culling, proxy meshes and viewport percentage display which helped with the viewport performance and also saved me time not having to create a custom geometry nodes setup for scattering objects.

For the buildings, cars and ground to not look too clean, I mixed in a rust material in all of these materials individually and mixed them based on their visibility and deterioration to achieve a believable result.

After noticing the cars sticking out of my test renders I realized that all of them had emissive materials for some reason, which was easily fixed by just plugging their textures into the base color instead of the emissive input + the cars looked a bit messy which was easily fixed by just shading them smooth and that was only done to the most front car + I added some extra ivy on top to make it more believable.

Almost all of the assets where not scaled properly which gave the scene an unnatural fake look, but having a character in the scene for scale reference made this an easy fix by resizing everything accordingly.

For the lighting I tried manually placing lights, using a HDRI, using an addon called True-Sky and even manually modelling volumetric clouds to get the right look. All of them gave me various results but in the end using a sky texture gave me the best lighting.

This scene was created using Blender and the Post Processing was done in Photoshop.

I spent 20 hours on this artwork - This includes research, trial & error phase, multiple revisions and rendering times.

See more of my artworks:
https://www.thomasfrose.com/
https://www.artstation.com/thomasfrose

Attributions:

Car 3D Models:
Destroyed Car 02 (Raw Scan) by Renafox (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/destroyed-car-02-raw-scan-263fa4d595fa45e988d5c6e236cbf293)
Destroyed Car 03 (Raw Scan) by Renafox (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/destroyed-car-03-raw-scan-483fe7f26336463fba66638ca4200c5a)
Destroyed Car 06 (Raw Scan) by Renafox (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/destroyed-car-06-raw-scan-222688561ba74a638c51a8af36ad0255)
Destroyed Car 07 (Raw Scan) by Renafox (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/destroyed-car-07-raw-scan-916b51c7e5644eb2a6c9b3797ebb08cf)

Various 3D Models:
Character "Gas Mask" by Mixamo (https://www.mixamo.com/)
Foliage by GScatter (https://www.graswald3d.com/gscatter)
M16 Assault Rifle by Mateusz Woliński (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/m16-assault-rifle-339d0f7b21024387853dd926a5d51b50)
Ms Barrel by Sergy Vigore-Panevin (https://www.blenderkit.com/get-blenderkit/b5a32cc2-869e-4cf1-ad8a-609fd3f0c83d/)
Paint Spray by Elnaz Ebmz (https://www.blenderkit.com/get-blenderkit/8a696151-8664-4a5b-a3f9-aba90bac692c/)
Traffic Cone by Subhashs Simon (https://www.blenderkit.com/get-blenderkit/b1d06c04-9712-4b23-a7ea-4f6f8587f8fd/)
Bridge by Maxim Samsonkin (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/bridge-346220b3831141a19bd8911bdbb823f4)
Street Light 03 by Lito Studio (https://www.blenderkit.com/get-blenderkit/e1060808-76ac-4c55-9338-941c8d0bc84e/)
Ivy: Blender's integrated Ivy Generator

Materials:
Damaged Asphalt by belaid ziane (https://www.blenderkit.com/get-blenderkit/86b335e9-d78d-4b0a-8bd5-5fac485c5bfc/)
Ground Sidewalk 01 by Julio Sillet (https://www.blenderkit.com/get-blenderkit/ccc93b2d-6ae5-4271-af5d-d91d38e2688a/)
Rust by Xu Fishbed (https://www.blenderkit.com/get-blenderkit/e7750e9d-409f-4114-a7c9-f8c95ec00391/)