Paid Early-Access Environments City Backdrop

A large and highly efficient city backdrop for your scenes. I built this to serve as a city background for other assets like an apartment or house, but it is very versatile so you can use it for street scenes and all sorts of other purposes too, supporting different weather conditions and time of day. Featuring full custom normal, metallic and emissive maps, custom distant ocean, and custom reflection probes. Suitable for dressing up in different styles as you wish, for example you could turn it into a cyberpunk city with some extra assets.

Handy tips​

This is a very large asset so here's some tips for getting the most out of it in your scenes.

Moving around​

By default the asset will load with you 60m in the air, suitable for a high rise apartment or office for example. In such a large city moving to another area in VAM can be difficult but there are some tricks you can use to make life easier:

• Instead of moving your scene in the City, it is better to leave it where it is and move the city asset instead.
• For a street level scene set the Y position of the city to 60m (you can just type this in to save clicking too much), this will put you on the main street.
• I have left a large open area for you to place big custom assets behind the main street, e.g a big house or street asset, to quickly get there set the city asset Y position to 60m and Z to -150m
• You can make rotating and placing scenes easier by temporarily setting the world scale really high, this will let you move the asset as if it were in miniature.
• When you have found a good spot for your scene and you just want to rotate the city asset you can add an Empty atom and parent the city to it, you can then rotate the Empty and the whole city will rotate around its position.

Skyboxes​

Scale​

You can use any Skybox with the city but due to its size you may find parallax problems in elevated scenes. The default VAM skyboxes for example are quite small so are only recommended for street level scenes.
Other skyboxes are often also too small, but with these you can easily scale the asset up. Make them as big as they will go before they clip VAM’s render distance limit for best results. I recommend using Romolas’ Skyboxes but they are particularly tiny so I usually just set them straight to 10x scale.

Height​

The horizon on some skyboxes might not meet the horizon on the water leaving a weird gap, to fix this simply reduce the Y position of the skybox asset until the horizon matches.

Reflection Probes​

The city asset uses reflection probes to get the window reflections you see. These probes are set to minimum priority so they shouldn’t interfere with ones that come with other assets you use.
If you do find reflections being overridden I’ve found that adding one of Norm’s reflection probes will help encourage VAM to use the correct one for your asset. Weird I know but it seems to work, that’s what I did in the Bus Ride demo.

Make it rain!​

Add Blazedust’s ColorScale plugin to the City asset, tick the Enable Coloring box, press the Select all components button then turn up the glossiness. More glossy = more rain!

Shadows​

By default VAM doesn't cast shadows very far, but you can increase them using Hazmhoxs' VAMTweaks plugin at a small potential cost to close up quality and performance.

Demo Scenes​

I have built a demos package to show off some some of the weather and effects and also a City Bus ride and a Glass Elevator ride.

This work is based on Imaginary city I by Tom licensed under CC-BY-4.0