Path of Decay

The Story

The Idea

The main motivation for this scene was to create a strong contrast between two different futures by splitting the world in two. On the left side, we have Nature taking back the city. On the right side, there is a Cyberpunk survival zone.

The Narrative

The scene shows a city long after civilization collapsed. On the left, humans have vanished and nature is reclaiming its space. You can see vines growing over the abandoned concrete buildings. It is quiet and empty. On the right, people are still trying to live there. It has neon lights and technology, but it's not a perfect future — it is dirty, full of industrial waste, and overflowing dumpsters.

The Protagonist

The iridescent car is the main character of the scene. The color-shifting paint reflects the mood of the city: Green like the nature from certain angles, but artificial purple from other directions. The glowing exhausts show that it was moving fast, but now it has stopped. It seems undecided. Is it staying in the quiet lane, or is it about to switch lanes and enter the chaotic city on the right? Is it a rich person escaping the ruined city, or is it just a facade and the driver searching for refuge near piles of trash?

• To the image

Render Statistics

Assets

We would never be able to model such an extensive scene if there were no artist that share their work for free with the community. For that reason it is important to show respekt for their work. Click below to see a list of all the assets that we used.

• All Assets

The Process

From the very beginning, we knew we wanted the scene to center around a car.

This is our initial sketch. The idea was to have a sports car in an abandoned foggy city with a big bridge and some elements of the "Cyberpunk" look we eventually went, e.g. neon signs.

We then modeled our sketch in blender, initially in a night setting. However, we weren't satisfied with the car model or the lighting, so those were the first things we changed.

Next, we realized the massive bridge was cluttering the scene and only blocking the view, so we decided to remove it to open up the sky.

Once the bridge was gone, the concept of a split world came to our mind. We committed to this and from there, the evolution is clear: we began adding aggressive overgrowth to the left and chaotic Cyberpunk elements to the right, refining the details until we reached the final result.

Credits

A huge thank you to the course instructors for teaching us how to code this renderer. A special thanks goes to the tutors (especially Nils) for their invaluable support and guidance throughout the assignments and the rendering competition.
Honestly, without your help, debugging this thing would have been even more of a nightmare.