Another special part for me was recreating the glass material with the Japanese sign and the signs in the foreground. I actually was able to figure out what the signs say in the original image so I could recreate the exact same letters and color. Sadly, I did not know the exact same font. The three signs on the left side of the image are also actual maps of the real place. Small details like that definitely helped me selling realism in the image.

What Megascans Materials to Choose

It really depends on your scene. If I had to choose though, I would definitely recommend every brick material and street imperfections like asphalt patches and potholes since they are really detailed. Also, things like rocks and nature stuff from them are really insane. For another scene, I also used a lot of their Icelandic scans.

Lighting

The lighting in this scene was definitely the hardest thing to do. For me, it was really tough to place all the lights to make them look natural. I really had to analyze the original image quite a few times to understand where all the light sources are and how I could achieve correct shadows. I started with a free night skydome from hdrihaven.com. After that, I placed a couple of rectangle lights with a fluorescent lamp HDRI. I always used directional lights with V-Ray values around 0,8-0,9. When I had the basic light setup done I created the four important lights: the inside of the police station, the lamp in the park on the left side, the lamp on the right side in the background, and the green lights above the garage. It was all a game of adjusting intensities and directions. For instance, the inside of the police had lights on the ceiling and one big directional light above the entrance which was aiming at the street. I constantly changed the settings of lights because I always compared them to the original image and really tried to match them.