Kaiju Crush will stomp it’s way through many iconic cities of the world and so we thought we would share our process when creating these backgrounds. We have used the New York scene for this post.

Based on references of the city, a rough concept sketch with all the elements are created in a scene.

The buildings are basically comprised of low poly cubes with bends and taper modifiers applied. which are applied bend and taper modifiers, The rough shape of the Statue of liberty done with regular poly modeling. The base ground is a triangulated hemisphere with edges that have been pushed, pulled and relaxed. All the geometry is hard edged.

The cliffs and mountains in the background have been created with triangulated, hard edged faces and molded with push, pull, relax and shift tools. The Greeble plugin was used to generate the buildings in the distance.

Created the triangulated trees and used push, pull, and relax tools to get the desired look. We also added a hard edged smoothing group.

Populated the terrain with the trees and created the mountains using the same techniques and kept everything hard edged.

At this point the entire scene is exported out 3D Studio Max and imported into Zbrush. Using an automatic unwrap we set about giving the scene and assets a quick poly paint round with varied color gradients.

The scene is then exported from Z brush and imported into Keyshot, where we setup lighting and do render passes based on the object types (trees, buildings, mountains are all done separately).

The final composition is brought into Photoshop where we do blending, add effects, color correction and various passes (clown, depth, specular and ambient occlusion).