The plate was created and laid out in Vue. I started out with a much smaller scale for the project but decided to go for a bigger render when I found that the scene has some potential. It also originally didn't have the bridges between the towers. When playing around I kind of liked the idea and kept them in. Rendered with multipass for best flexibility in the Photoshop post work stage. There I overpainted quite some elements, added lights and detail to make the city feel alive. Last but not least I used Lightroom to push the atmosphere and feel a little more.

Here we have the plate I started the postwork with. A lot of things changed, obviously. I wanted to maintain a certain level of detail but also tried not to waste too much time for pixel perfect adjustments. I added lots of city textures to fill the scene with lights and life. I still ended up doing a lot of tedious micro-composition work with individually placing lights on the buildings and all that. I also invested some extra time into making the overall light work as good as possible. The scene is pretty dark and I wanted to keep it that way. But I also tried to make parts of the city stand appart from each other. So there's a structure to it that doesn't make it all look too much the same.

The foreground was added to give the scene a better sense of scale. Again I wanted to avoid too much visual noise and kept the elements as clean and flat as possible.

The original image is 6000x2739 large and there is some really neat detail in there. The following pics show the full detail of the image in 100% and best possible quality. It's one of these pieces you can constantly discover new details you have not noticed before. I love that!