THE CITY
This city model wasn't intended to have as much detail as it has - it was originally intended to be a rough model that I could blow up with a NUKE!! I'd seen some great mushroom-cloud renders on the net, and thought I'd have a go at blowing up a city!
The idea was to use a very restricted palette of materials - all pretty much one colour. There were probably about 10 different materials, using a few different noise textures, and some very subtle colouring. Some of these renders have quite a lot of photoshop post-editing in which I dail up the saturation to make these subtle tones more extreme.
ARRAY MODIFIERS
There aren't really many neat tricks used in this model - except the use of ARRAYS, to model the various floors of the blocks of flats, pavement stones, or to make the pateo-paving in the park.
NUKE ATTACK!
Hopefully I'll get round to blowing this place up sooner or later! I'll post some stills 'n' animation when I've pushed the big red button. (for the greater good, of course!) ....THE GREATER GOOD!
RENDERING
The only other thing to mention, is perhaps the shadows used in these renders. To avoid super-sharp edged shadows, I used higher sample values in the lamp setups, and increased the SOFT parameter to suit the style. This does increase rendering time by a significant amount - but it makes all the difference! HAPPY BLENDING!