I started by collecting some references from the web that suited my direction, and with that helping me decide on a color pallete and building shapes. Once I filled my head with visuals, I dove directly into 3D studio max (version 2009) and started to sketch in some boxes, no detail, just basic structures, trying to find a good relationship of height and scale between them.

Once I had a basic street structure, I created a camera, gave it the Cover resolution ratio (1:1) and refined the lens and FOV values. Once the camera was locked, I added some smaller details such as the drain pipes and some garbage bins along the alley, all very simple geometry.







The next step was to light the scene, and I used an array of Photometric area lights, with varying intensities and colors, all with low sampling shadows, since I wanted a fast render and knew that I would paint on top of this anyway.

I gave all the buildings an arch & design grey material with almost no Specular highlights, and gave the floor a glossier Shader since I knew it would be raining and wanted not to have to paint in all the reflections.









I rendered the image in several passes, a beauty, ambient occlusion and reflection, and also rendered black and white masks for all the different objects – one for pipes, one for bins, etc.

In Photoshop, I placed all the images I rendered as layers, and copied the masks into different channels, so I can easily select them when needed. The idea I had was to basically “paint” in the textures and finer details, to give it a more illustrative look that I know the band was looking for. I grabbed a lot of textures I collected over time, and bit by bit, matched them to the grey buildings of the render using the transform tools in PS