For my UV I simply used the quick planar on the buildings and all meshes with low details, and I used flatten for the others (Fig.08).


The advertising was made with a map I put inside a V-Ray light material. Photoshop was very helpful to help obtain a realistic glossy effect for the neon. The Rosen advertising was a transparent cylinder, and I used a fresnel in the opacity map so I didn't have problems with the front and the back side (Fig.09).

Lighting

The lighting was very important in this image. Usually light comes from the sky, but the night is different; the light come from the artificial lighting and light pollution in the sky of a big city.

I created one V-Ray dome light with a very low intensity for the sky and then used different light intensity for the street lamps and illuminated billboards.

Atmospheric Effects

In the last step before compositing I had to prepare some passes for the rain and the fog (Fig.10).