As soon as I heard "Square-Enix" and "Contest" I just HAD to give it a try, and since making my own characters isn't exactly my strong point, I was stoked to hear that backround designs were allowed too. Though, it had a urban-Tokyo theme, so I dived into something new that I have never done before...creating an urban environment rather than natural scenery. You can see the contest details and what it's all about here [link]

Now for the fun part, giving you the gist of how I made what you see Well first I found a few pics on the net to use as reference when modelling all objects in Cinema4D, that took nearly half of the total time to do. they were then imported to Vue 6 for better texturing and lighting. All but the cars were made by me ( they were free-to-use models that came with Vue ) the trees are customised Vue trees I turned into Cherry Blossoms too. Finally, postwork to the final render was done in photoshop, such as adding glow/flares around lights and light-beams that would have taken too long to render in 3D and that cool "wet look" on the road. Oh, and all signs and road patterns were made from scratche in Photoshop, no photo's used any further than reference for me to replicate.

Final 3D scene had just under 1 million polygons, just over 200 objects and Global Illumination lighting. Once again, rendering was done in two halves as my laptop can't handle rendering it fully at 2991x1978 ( I tried rendering it larger, but it took hours just to do 6 %, so I had to stop and settle for something smaller )

Oh, and I forgot to say that I'd rather not receive critique on this one other than directly from the *wewy team in the unlikely event I may win.

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