3D City Scene created in Blender/Cycles

Final render (Cycles)

I've been itching to give Blender's new render engine Cycles a spin so this week I decided to spend a few spare evenings working on this fictitious city scene having been inspired by another of Andrew Price's (a.k.a. Blender Guru) excellent tutorials over at http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/how-to-create-a-city.

The new lighting calculations give some satisfying results which I think I'm going to start using on new 3D projects from now on. I've also noticed that complex scenes seem to render much more quickly with Cycles than Blender's internal Raytrace engine and also LuxRender which I am a big fan of.

I am tempted to have a stab at animating this as per Andrew's tutorial but I'll have to leave the 3D workstation on a serious overnight rendering session to achieve it! I modelled about 20 different buildings and used the hair particle emitter to distribute the buildings across the view. I then manually positioned a few of the larger, high-rise buildings in the scene to try and make it a bit more varied. There's probably a lot more I could do to this render but I'm happy enough with it for now.

Blender viewport render looking a bit like SimCity here!