I’m currently working on making a futuristic nighty city to use in a short cinematic. I am a complete and utter n00b when it comes down to materials. I’m trying to get the windows looking natural and looking for pointers on what I should do.
Currently experimenting with noise filter to try and make it appear like some of the windows are randomly black and the lights are off inside. It looks okay but I’m hoping there’s a way to make the noise appear more linear and sharp edged? Maybe along a certain axis? No clue what I’m doing so any ideas help
Typically you’d find a good texture of office light to tile across your building. In the material you’d hook it up to a multiply node so you can color it anything you want. For it to look like it’s inside the building, you’ll want to use the bump offset node. There’s lots more to refine from there, but hopefully that’ll be enough to get you started.
Thank you. I don’t mean to be rude but in the picture I linked I have a high quality light tiling across my buildings. And there are multiple different colored buildings so I think that demonstrates I know how to color it anything I want.
I’m trying to get the effect that real life skyscrapers have where some of the window lights are turned off…So there will be black places alongside the windows of the skyscraper. Not sure if you are seeing the pictures but I’ll send another of the appearance I’m talking about.
For a cinematic shot of a scene this big you might want to consider using a stock photo, then cut out the buildings and place them in a 3D environment. This is still a modern technique.
Thanks I’ll probably end up using the photo idea for the background but I already have 3D building models that I think are a lot better for creating a futuristic feel. Im just simply trying to get black square tiling added onto a material. Seems like it should be a very easy solution as I’ve created black tiling on my own. Just not in the form of black squares
Then you’d somehow have to randomize which square is black and which one is white, perhaps using a random factor or position based factor and clamping a certain range to be black. The result, the white / black mask, can be used as an input for a blend by alpha node where A is a lit building and B is an unlit building and Alpha is the mask.
Here’s a bit about randomization and shapes:
. There is another option, you could go into your 3D software and create 2 additional materials, one for the unlit windows and one for the lit ones. Then within the 3D software you manually assign the window planes to one of the materials. Blender3D got automated options to randomly select and deselect planes.
Thank you. Your searching skills are much better than mine. I’ll try to play around with all the info and hopefully get something. Another note that was probably worth mentioning earlier is that this effect is already perfectly created in blender by someone else but I failed at getting it into unreal. Perhaps there’s something obvious I’m missing?
