Blender 2.5 City Lights (WIP)
I was fiddlin' with some ideas and came up with this.
Overcooked the vector blur a bit, and I'm not happy with the sense of scale but it's a start.
Best bit about this technique is that it's so simple. The whole thing consists of two models and three textures: the buildings, a ground plane, sky picture, building picture and a generated voronoi pattern. The building model is an array of cubes with their dimensions influenced by the voronoi generated pattern, like a height and density map in one. The sky is an angular-mapped HDRI photo influencing ambient occlusion. The lights and textures on the buildings are from a single photo UV mapped. One texture from the photo; made high-contrast and white-mapped to the RGB levels; influences the emit value of the material. A second texture influences colour and normals. Combining the two with a bit of jiggling the UV map gives enough variation to fool the eye.
As usual, all modeled, textured, composited and redered in Blender 2.5.
