Midnight on the Shuto-Kou by MartianGopnik on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

(首都高, short for 首都高速道路. Lit. "Metropolitan High-Speed Road")

I learned how to use motion blur for this one. The camera is moving at 22.22 m/s (Tokyo Highway speed limit of 80 km/h) and the rainbow boi is moving at 26 m/s to give it a "photo taken from rear seat of another car" look. I also used my existing knowledge of vehicle rigging to give the car's wheels significantly more motion blur. I modeled the tunnel after one of the ones on the "B" or "Bayshore" Route, which is notorious for having a bunch of crazy people with radical aerodynamic modifications driving back and forth at 300+km/h in the middle of the night (or it used to have them in the 1990s and 2000s, at least.)

Some side notes:
- Those are in fact the "Enkei Shutoko [sic]" wheels from my last submission, with aerodynamic covers of my own design. So this is Shutokos on the Shuto-Kou. Lol.
- The car used to be a simple blue, but then I was googling how to do a zinc passivation finish and came across a tutorial for an iridescent shader by this absolute gangster called Ducky 3D. I decided to try it out on this car I made (inspired by Honda CR-X, CR-Z, Chevrolet Volt?! and Tokyo Xtreme Racer.) It actually seems to better light up the car, and also helps to highlight its low-poly nature.
- 309k triangles on dis boi. I wanted those shiny ceramic tiles that you see everywhere in Japan and China. Each tile is 2 triangles, plus 8 more for the grout. This adds up quickly when there are literally fucking thousands of them, and the Japanese people who built tunnels like this IRL actually placed physical tiles that actually weigh something and require a process to attach to a surface, for many km of tunnels... I'm starting to see how that country has built so much stuff. Just little "keep going" tricks like placing millions of little pointless tiles...

Edit, day of upload: I spent another hour and a half messing around with tiling textures on the outer wall. I got away with an 80x28-pixel image size for the tile and just repeated it like crazy. It looks very slightly worse both up close in viewport and from the camera view in the render. I suspect it's mostly an issue of me needing to scale the textures bigger with distance, but I don't feel like playing around with this image any more, at least right now... At any rate, I cut the triangle count from 309k to ~80k and the file size from 16 MB to ~5. I kept a single column of tiles for reference (and in case I want to revert the .blend file back to the way it is in this render.)

Edit No.2, 2024/02/11: Another hour and a half of getting rid of textures, making one segment of tunnel modular and then alt-D-ing it. Oh yeah and figuring out how to align the damn thing because snapping didn't work properly... I ended up snapping to a vertex, constraining to one axis, and repeating twice more with different axes and vertices... A screwy solution, but I got the scene from 309k triangles to ~40k with no loss in quality and the .blend file from 16 MB to ~3.5 MB. Emboldened by this and the fact that my motel scene rendered in Cycles in under 2 minutes, I tried rendering this one in Cycles as well. I gave up after ten minutes (and the first half wasn't even finished at that point.) I suppose the shit-tonne of lights and the motion blur add a lot of rendering time.