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For a while now i have been trying to recreate the picture below, it is a city scene from Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.
But i am struggling with the lighting and my project ends up looking very dark with few reflections, here is a render:
What i would like to know is what i have to change in my scene to achieve the look i am going for. Inside of each of the buildings i have one plane with a city building texture on it and that is hooked up with an emission node.
Make the lights inside the windows brighter, maybe? Also maybe use some stronger, colorful world lighting, just to fake the effect of bright city lights. This will brighten up the scene more.
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I agree with Rix Yarbrough, the scene needs more light.
But the light is not to use it as is, but to play with it later in the compositor. It just asks for some glare filter for the windows. You can add material index pass to your render layer to use glare only for windows (and set pass index for the material as well). Or just use Emission render pass.
Believe me, you will never get an image like your reference with raw render only and no post-processing.
Try a night time HDR from: https://hdrihaven.com/hdris/category/?c=night This will liven up the scene a little bit, but to make it as vibrant as your screenshot, you should add some colored lights between the buildings
