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Cities in Data

Cities in Data

Alexander Eskin
January 19, 2017
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Cities in Data is a personal project where I tried to combine pretty pictures with clean infographics. The idea came up at work when I couldn't get the desired image quality at the time frame. All the infographics are real, I used actual data for all the cities.



I came up with the idea while doing a job at work. The timeframe for that job was super small and i decided to do the same task without time limits at my spare time. I wanted to do something impressive and simple at the same time, so I choose to use an SSS shader as a main shader for illustrations. It makes geometry look lighter and produces interesting color results.


I used CityEngine to generate the city. It is a nice tool when you need an abstract city quick. The interface is very intuitive and a free trial is 30 days. Then I exported geometry to 3ds Max via fbx and rendered it with Corona renderer. I chose Corona for it's interactive rendering feature and intuitive shader workflow. Each image took around 6 hours to render. For compositing and infographics I used After Effects. All the numbers are real, i used official sources for Hong Kong and other cities.


People responded overwhelmingly positive. It was featured on Behance, I got tons of positive feedback. Very satisfying.
I learned that using SSS shader is very simple and yet beautiful way to improve your illustrations. But it has some big issue - render times. Other render engines are much faster but I couldn't achieve the desired quality with them (matter of experience).

Alexander Eskin

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