The Rails

Being in the background, and thus of less importance, the rail is created out of splines which have been copied several times, with thickness.

The Ground

The ground is just a segmented plane with noise and displacement. I have used VrayDisplacementMod: 3D mapping type with bump map from material in Texmap slot, which will be described later in this article. A have also used Edit Poly modifier to "dig” two holes for catch pits.

The Character

I wanted to have something unique in this scene, to contrast the light, pleasant atmosphere with the hooded, strange-looking person on the stairs. I did not want to spend a lot of time modelling the human, adding details of clothing etc, so I only used tools available in max: biped and reactor. First I placed biped and posed it on stairs, then I modelled a simple cloak with a hood using plane and edit poly. Next I used reactor to drop the cloak on the biped. The rest was easy; a few noise modifiers, moving some vertices, turbo smooth and again noise.