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For this competition I went back to what I know best, architecture. Thinking about the apocalypse I wondered what would happend when we (humans) would be gone. I wanted to create a desolated street, where everything was left untouched but you could guess something had happend some time ago, the moon would be there staring broken in the sky, hinting at some mayor disaster yet unexplained.
I thought of doing a small street in Malasaña (one of the oldest Madrid Districts) that I love 'cause it reminds me so much of my hometown. So I pulled some pictures of that district, and found one street that suited me and mixed with other places from there. A few months back there was a street exposition of urban grafitties where famous artists where called to "enhance" the street experience, so the grafitties you see are actually there, just not all in the same spot .
The textures I got them from cgtextures, and mixed it a lot between them to get that worn look. The places are all modeled by me from actual pictures of the whole district, just as the graffities. The props in the first right hand shop are from google's warehouse. Also some of the textures and props are from photos taken during my "main job" as an archi of some of the buildings I've worked on of the same style.
The street has been modeled in sketchup and the debris has been created in sculptris, then all mixed in max for some minor addons and texture tweaking.
There is still some things to go, my other main characther (besides the moon) is still to be done, and some textures need tweaking, and there are a few small props to be added to add a little more information about what happend.
The moon has been done in max following this nice tutorial http://cgcookie.com/max/2009/08/18/crea ... ng-planet/ and a moon texture (from my previous contest entry) for the outside and some turbulence for the rest and an emmitter for the cracks.
This are just some test shots to setup the materials, but I wanted to show you how it looked.

OMG what is happening here, so much dirt - but computers are so clean and digital, you are not supposed to do dirty things to it
nice work, the exploding moon part has a nice vibe,
awesomeness

omg... I am doing almost identical scene... LOL
Well, minus the moon...

Looking good! Too late for me to start a new concept though

@ acc24ex, yeap, this is kind of a revenge, when I do archviz stuff they never let me put dirt on it... go figure, so now that I have the chance.... garbage, dirt and gore everywhere you look!
@ tehfailsafe, that's a good thing, brilliant minds think alike (or render freaks love the dirt, whichever applies) anyway, we could do our own meta-thread of deserted cities. It's the apocalypse after all, muhahahaha.
Also I'm thinking I could use the images to illustrate the next garbage pickup services strike!

omg... I am doing almost identical scene... LOL
Well, minus the archvis stuff...



face

Looking good, but the planet scale looks like the scale is off.

@ face,
@ Dayvids, yes it is, the thing is that the moon was going to be a prop, so it has around 5m diameter, and I say was because when I tried to use it since it's surface was much much larger than my other lights it made my regular emmitter throw noisy light. So now it's going to be a background HDRI for the scene. I'll re-render it with it's own scale.

my first words were "Of my god".
Fantastic stuff mate, how ever you need to be more precise with your DOF, also some are a little bit grainy

Thanks Radiant, I just found that DOF control has changed a little in this build (or I just realized, at least) and I was having fun playing with it, and it came a little too forced, and most are about 200-400 samples, far from cooked, just some quick partial tests. Today, rendering a whole scene test after 14K samples my glass is still grainy, don't quite know how to solve it, I'll have to do some more tests...

well, I overcame two problems last night, the main one was the moon, I wanted to add it to the scene, but since I thought that the proper way would be for it to be an emitter with a texture, having such a huge difference in size with the rest of the emitter of the scene I was getting noise in the regular "lamps". Then last night I went back and thought that actually the moon does not emitt light, it reflects it, so if I used an emitter, the same size than the others, but much more powerful, pointed in it's direction, the effect, besides being more realistic would not affect the rest of the scene, also I added a second one and put it inside, and deleted the cracks so light would come throug, this one would have a small size, also, and a low temp to get that redish effect.
Here is the result, I know that it's too sharp, but that's cause I wanted to see how it looked. I'll have to play with it, but it was just what I was looking for.
My second problem was the noise in the glass in the panels in the shop, I changed from PT to PMC and it solves the scene in many less samples, (after 13K in Pt I was getting noise, with almost 3K I get clean glass with a little hotpixel removal in PMC). So it's all working great, now I need my main character... that'll take some work, and it might not be needed, but is something I want to do.