I mean you can imagine how to make each of the pieces in that render by itself. Probably took a while to make all of the pieces and to render tho.

>>1026965
If you don't have other worries then you can take your time to do cool shit

Notice how dark and distant the scenery is?

>>1026965
>>1026966
>>1026968
>>1026970
It’s obviously a background with light programming to follow a specific pattern. There is no feeling of flying cars being assholes to make their travel faster. Only the character and the building she stands is the actual model. All other things are photos.

>>1026965
Just start making buildings/skyscrapers in your down time. I used to do at least 1 building a day, sometimes more. After a while you have an entire city's worth quicker than you'd expect. Which means you have an entire city's worth of buildings you can use for just about any project any time.
Generic skyscrapers are extremely simple, they're literally the same floor repeated a shitload of times with a cap (or several different caps that you can use for variety). I'd model 1/4th of the building and mirror on the XY axis and then just array them upwards. Make a cap to top it and you have a skyscraper.
Obviously for the eyecatcher buildings you'd put a little more love into them, but for 90% of the filler buildings you can whip up fairly quickly. Even quicker if you just do boxes with building textures.

>>1026966
>>1026979
But how do I replicate the atmosphere, if that makes sense?

>>1026983
By choosing the correct focal length, adding volumetrics and bloom

>>1026988
>>1026983
Yup. The trick the op artist is lulling is he hade it dark and blurry. All the lighting comes from below, and is very localized. A few of the buildings are themselves light sources. Nothing is light so you can see it well. It's light for the hypothetical people walking and driving on street level.
Depth of field, fog, volumetric effects are all ways of covering and blurring levels with something else in a (hopefully) intelligent way. The less of the actual piece the viewer can see the more their brain will fill in the blanks.

>>1026965
max hays has tutorials for a very similar style

she's looking at the billboard of video playing pre-rendered AI lol. unless a flight through towards those buildings in the distance is provided, then I'll stand on this hill

>>1026965
it's much much easier than you think IF you're using premade stuff
if the guy literally did the character modeling, rigging, animation, modeling, texturing, fx and so on great work
otherwise the hard part is to place the objects honestly

>>1026965
some weird perspective shit happening when the camera looks down. i don't think that city is real so that makes recreating it a lot simpler