I tried three times to photograph Bahnhof Prinzenstrasse in Downtown Berlin. All three series were okay, but not breathtaking. I wanted to capture a very strong perspective with a close, detailed foreground, also a dynamic horizon along with a good view on the old station. Finally I came up with the idea to capture the shot in pooring rain in order to add reflecting details that lead to a complete different experience when whatching the scene. Most impostant: I managed not to get run over by some idiot driver... 

In order to get some depth, I had to change the background. Large buildings always work for a city scene, so I put the skyline of Dubai onto the horizon. Also important: The dark tonality of the foreground feels like dawn when combined with the street lanterns and the lights in the background scene. It´s simple: Dark foreground + bright background = good impression of depth. 

All this Photoshop work would be nothing without a very strong eyecatcher that dominates the scene. I found the "Monopod" in Doug Chiangs book "Mechanika", a futuristic designed one axis racer. I can strongly recommend this book to all of you out there looking for out of the box design for cars, space ships and all sorts of vessels you would not expect to see on any street. So I asked Doug if I can use his design and he agreed. I changed some details in order to make it look heavier and more like a truck. 

The Monopod was modelled and rendered in MAXONs Cinema 4D. I set the lights according to the photographed scene and put the rendering right into the Photoshop file. Then all the little details were added, like the water splashes, the raindrops and the lights of the Monopod. 

The used look of the Monopod is a combination of two shaders that are mixed within Cinema 4D by using a vertex map. This allows me to paint directly onto the geometry of the pod without messing around with UVs. The guy is a 3D character from Adobe FUSE (still runs on Mojave on my Macbook). 

As you might know: Building a scene like this is a hard fight especially at the beginning of the project. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, let me know what you think!