Quick and dirty menu image

This week I created some menu background images for the sniper game we're currently developing.
Because of a closing deadline I only had about four to five hours for each image.

In this blog I'll explain how I've created the image for the main menu. Because of the limited time I decided to only use the low poly 3D in-game assets.
I made a copy of Eugene's city game environment, added a camera and played around with it until I was happy with the camera view.

I decided to render the image's lighting in separate files, so I could easily adjust the lighting and shadows in Photoshop. This can save of a lot render settings tweaking time while making the Photoshop file much more flexible.

First I rendered a diffuse map set to full emissive, resulting in an image without shadows. Looks ugly doesn't it?

Next I placed a direct light and only rendered this light's dropshadows:

I used a default skylight for this render:

Finally I rendered an occlusion map which only creates dark inner corners:

All images are imported in Photoshop and placed all layers on top of eachother, using different blending styles. This creates the image below:

I found a suitable sky- and city skyline using my google skills, did some color correction on it and pasted it in a layer behind the city renders:

In the next step I added some fire, smoke, dirt and jets to the scene:

In the final step I did some color correction, added lighting effects and a faint blur around the canvas edge. The final result can be seen below:

That's it! The image is done in just a few hours.

Cheers,
Matt