"Athens O-live" (Result of "Recreating Patission")

Hello everyone!!!
So I had created a week ago a wip thread (which was actually my first post on the Internet ever), about a personal project of mine: recreating Patission street, a central road in Athens. So, check out the wip thread for some past progress.
Of course here is the final result, titled “Athens O-live”:


External references: Few of the textures are from cgtextures.com, the equirectangular sky background is by Flickr user heiwa4126, but most of the textures are procedural.

I am using Blender for about two years. This is my third big project in Blender, and it involved only it (no other programs).

The story of how I ended up creating this image:
The last years a crisis has hit the world, and my country, Hellas (Greece), especially suffers from that crisis. The situation is difficult, which has forced lots of shops to shut down. One particular street, Patission, in the center of Athens, was completely affected by the situation. While some years ago it was full of life, with lots of shops and people walking all day long, now most of the shops are “ruins” and few people are still enjoying their walks in that road. But, I also remembered a myth, according to which in Ancient Athens the Gods chose Goddess Athena as the protector of their city after she offered them an olive tree as a gift. These thoughts inspired me to create this scene.

Here are links to later posts in this thread about different aspects of the project:
Targets I had set from the beginning;
Workflow I followed in order to achieve the result;
Statistics involving the project and the result;

Also, I will be posting in this thread some wireframes/viewports, test renders and other versions.
Your comments, questions and feedback are welcome.
-Jonathan

Here are some statistics involving the creation of the image:
-Software: Blender (only) versions 2.67 and 2.68
-Computer with wich I worked on and rendered this scene: CPU on a Toshiba Satellite L655, with a Intel Core i5 CPU, 2 Cores and 4 GBs of RAM.
-Vertices: A total of 631.952 vertices
-Rendering: With the Cycles rendering engine. There were four renders: a main one of the overall scene, that took 13 hours and 11 minutes, with 16x16 tiles, 500 samples, no caustics, and the dimensions of 3200x2400, a second one of the olive tree only but refined which took about 15 minutes. These two were saved as open EXR Multi-layer, with the passes of Material Index, Environment, Mist (which I didn’t used) and Combined of course. Then there was a render of the world/environment at a higher definition. Finally there was a fourth render of the composite, in a separate file, which took 2 minutes and a half, at the same dimensions.
-Total time taken for the whole project: about two weeks.

I will be posting other information I want to talk about for this image.
-Jonathan

So I want to talk about my overall workflow
First af all, after coming up with an idea, I went out and took lots of my own reference photos. At the beginning, I just wanted one picture of the general angle, but I ended up taking lots of photos of special and historical buildings as well as general street props. I then watched all the images, and started finding things I wanted to model. After finishing a model, I would shade it in Cycles instantly, because I still had it fresh in my mind. After finishing modelling and shading most of the props, I started modelling buildings, first the telecommunications building, then the National Archaeological Museum, then some typical buildings from the 60s-80s and other. I also shaded each building right after finishing modelling it. Most of the textures are procedural (except the Museum, the telecommunications building, the road and the road signs). After modelling everything, I had to get the proportions right as well as the exact dimensions to be more accurate. Then I had to arrange everything, but I didn’t want the street in the final result to be exactly as the real road, but to have accurate models and in the same time my own arrangement/composition. After the final arrangement of the scene, there was lighting. I used one sun lamp, as well as an area lamp with a bright blue-grey color from behind the camera and a HDRI equirectangular by flickr user heiwa4126. After that, there was rendering (which happened overnight) with some passes which I explained in the statistics of the project. Then I did some compositing, which I found it made the scene look more natural. I made the sky glow in order to achieve the effect you see when taking a photo agianst the sun. Finally, I rendered the composite and the project was finished.

Any questions, comments or feedback are welcome.
-Jonathan

This is an altered patission street.
It perfectly proves one thing. Having modeled the buildings of this city, no matter how you place them, compose them, the same city will be.
I don’t understand what are these shadowed meshes on the background, under acropolis.

Thanks for the response, michalis. Indeed, this street, and the city in general, has a specific character, that I don’t think it will change. This of course happens with lots of cities, towns or villages around the globe.
For the shadowed meshes, if you are talk about the things behind the olive tree, in the background under acropolis, it is the mountain on top of which acropolis rests. It is made with the ANT landscape add-on, and I didn’t really have time to finish it.
-Jonathan

Jonathan, why not trying the dyntopo sculpting system? Subdivide a cube (simple, not catmul clark) an just sculpt a few strokes on it. Project from view, a rocky map.

Great work Jonathan, I love the mood of the piece, it was great to see it develop in your WIP too.

Athens is just shit, both in the real world and in 3D XD
Just, kidding(I’m greek…), very nice image!
Just a questions, I see in the WIP thread you are using a lot of tris, why is that?

Well, first of all, I have only done one project with sculpting, and it involved animated shape keys, so I couldn’t use dyntopo. So in this project I couldn’t really “afford” to start experimentng with dyntopo and sculpting, even if I really want to get into it more, because of the time experimentations take. I also didn’t want to have too many vertices. So the only solution that I found, with some control over subdivisions and a mountain-ish look is the ANT landscape add-on. Its material was a diffuse with dark green color, a diffuse with dark brown color, mixed with a noise texture factor. Then that is mixed with a light orange-cream color diffuse, in order to achieve a manual fog/mist, which is enhanced with compositing.
But I actually want to start experimenting with some sculpting, I have some projects in mind that may involve it.
-Jonathan

Καλημέρα antoni4040!!!
The reason why I am using lots of trigons, is because I applied the decimate modifier for some of the far away models, basicly only Acropolis. But, now I remember that I didin’t post any viewport yet, so the reason why there are trigons in the wireframes I have posted, as I explained in the first post of the wip thread, is because of the new cycles wireframe node in Blender 2.68m that supports only trigons, it can’t show the real wireframe for now. I heard that they will fix it.
Υ.Γ.: Αν θα μπορούσες να επεξεργαστείς το ποστ σου εδώ για να μην έχει άσχημη γλώσσα, θα ήταν καλύτερα. Απλώς θέλω να παραμείνει απλό.
-Jonathan

Hey Ian (idmillington),
Thanks for the feedback!!!
Thanks for seeing both the wip and the finished result!
I appreciate the feedback.
P.S. Apparently your comment was posted later because of your low post count, I saw it later.
-Jonathan

@antoni
athens is not shit. It is Our shit. Hands down.
I’m in, if you like to start more projects like this. I’m very good in painting dirt. This kind of dirt. I’m an expert. It’s my home. Living in the center of this city. Even a futuristic project. It won’t be like any other. Athens will always look like… Athens. :smiley:

This project had some general and specific targets from the beginning.
Technical/general targets:
-To introduce myself to architecture and props modelling for the first time,
-To improve my general Blender and other skills that are required for every project,
-To try to shade and texture using mostly procedural textures,
-To study the architecture of Patission street, which has very important historical buildings, being myself really interested about them,
-To recreate buildings and objects you would see in Patission street, but to arrange them the way I wanted.

Specific/parallel targets
-To introduce to other people a scenery that lots of Athenians see pretty much every day,
-To visualize some of my thoughts about watching more and more shops shutting down because of the difficult times by creating a fictional scene of Patission street with no life except for an olive tree.

So these are all my goals I had set, and I believe that I have achieved at some part every one of them.
-Jonathan

nice work and ideas :).

Athens is a great place but I do think a bit more planning permission restraint could have been exercised around the base of the Akropolis - there are way too many apartment blocks close to it.

Seriously it really saddens me to see Hellas in such a state, then again at least tried to do something about it, unlike here in Ireland where we just rolled over and accepted it o_O.

great, now i know how athens look,about :slight_smile: … i really like your thoughts with the tree, and how it illustrates the situation… wonderful project, thank you for sahring about your workflow.

r4ytrace:
Thank you for your feedback. Indeed, there is lack of organisation in the roads of Athens, there are lots of problems in the streets. Near Acropolis there are indeed buildings, but most of them are old, historical and important, Also, there is a very well known street that is for walking near it, called “Dionisiou Aeropagitou”, which is very nice. I also don’t want to say that only Greece is going through a very difficult situation, in every place in the world there are all kinds of problems.

doris:
Thank you for the feedback, too. Of course, it’s something else to see Athens, and something else to feel it. Just like every other place in the universe.
In the beginning I had another idea about the project. I wanted it to have Patission, and that every shop was closhed, not a single sign of life. But it sounded too pessimistic for me. There should always be hope. So, in a random moment, I thought of olives and their connection with Hellas, as well as the myth with Athena.

-Jonathan

Hi Jonathan,

really nice rendering. I am also from Athens, although i am not living any more in Greece. Patission Street was full with life. I was thinking if you could put some more Highlights on the Olive tree so it would be more Interesting and like this will come “the Hope” that i believe you wanted to give with this image. Congratulations for all the modeling. Looks amazing.

Γεια σου Κυριάκο!!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I somehow agree with you about highlighting the olive tree more. In fact, in the original raw cycles 3d render, the olive tree had lots of flaws and I didn’t like it so much. As I tell in my previous “statistics” post, I had to re-render the olive only by it self, with it lit better, with less dark materials and less bump. For now I think that it has a good contrast with the backgrround, but I may be wanting to refine it even more.
-Jonathan

Here is the image rendered from cycles, without any compositing/post processing:


The details about time it took etc. are in my previous “statistics” post.
I will be posting more things the following days about behind the scenes and tests.
-Jonathan

Here is the wireframe:


And the clay render:


-Jonathan