Chaos Logo
< All Blog Posts
Street scene after rain with shops, bikes, and wet pavement, header for Chaos blog article.
Tom Grimes

Tom Grimes

Last updated: September 01, 2025  •  3 min read

The Making of “Morning After the Rain”

Summary:

  • Shabeer, a CG artist from India, shared his popular "Morning After the Rain" image on the Corona forums, leading to a collaboration with the Corona team to create a 'making of' guide.
  • Inspired by works from other artists, Shabeer decided to create a photorealistic scene using the Corona renderer, focusing on European streets after rain.
  • The project involved gathering references, setting up a scene with a narrow street, and using an overcast sun HDRI map for lighting.
  • Modeling focused on creating realistic textures and materials, emphasizing reflections and glossiness to achieve the desired wet look.
  • Corona's Interactive Rendering feature significantly enhanced the workflow, allowing for efficient adjustments to materials and lighting.


Back in December 2016, Shabeer posted his “Morning After the Rain” image in the Corona forums, which proved very popular in the community! We spoke with him to learn what went into making these photoreal images.

Hi everyone! My name is Shabeer. I am a CG artist from India, and lead artist at a British construction consultancy company in Qatar.

After my post “Morning after the rain” on the Corona forum, I received a kind proposal from the Corona team to write a ‘making of’ about the scene, to share knowledge with our community. I have to say that I’m glad and honored to do that, so let’s begin!

Inspiration

The “after rain” concept is nothing new – I had seen images from Zhang Naigang and Marek Denko on the CGSgsociety forums years ago. I thought it would be nice to make a work with a similar ambiance one day, so I put their images into my “to-do” folder where I collect references for later use.

Recently, I decided to test drive Corona renderer. After doing some simple scenes I was impressed by the workflow and quality in Corona, so I thought “Why not tackle a technically demanding scene?” That’s how these images made their way out of the “to-do” folder.

References

With the inspiration in place, the next step was to gather some references. I started collecting photos of European streets. Googling “after the rain street” gives lots of beautiful photos, as well as other 3D renders.

Collage of photos and renders of European streets used as reference for Morning After the Rain.

Layout & lighting

Without any plan, I quickly blocked out a narrow street with buildings on both sides and set up a camera and the lighting. The main source of light is just one ‘overcast sun’ HDRI map.

3D blockout of narrow street layout with building volumes in modeling software.
3D blockout of a city street with simple gray building shapes and pavement used for scene layout.

Modeling & materials

As I usually do, I started with the foreground, which is the pavement and the road. Since we want to have pools of water, the pavement needed to be irregular.

Modeling was straightforward. I first found a texture and extruded a plane with segments that matched the tiles, then added noise to give some slight irregularity to the tiles. A plane with water material was added on top to fill the dips with water:

3D model of wet cobblestone pavement with grid overlay and texture map applied in modeling software.

Creating the materials took up the largest part of the time. All the textures needed to be saturated and darkened – the key here is to add reflection to everything with an appropriate glossiness. The foreground materials also have displacement for the fine details:

Material node editor in Corona showing texture maps and displacement setup for wet curb tiles.

Here’s a look at the texture map for the road:

Texture map of a wet asphalt road surface with crosswalk and lane markings for 3D rendering.

Here is the first test render from this stage, where I also added some trees to get a feel of the atmosphere:

Render of rainy street scene with reflective pavement, bare trees, and surrounding buildings.

Now it was time to start populate the scene. I started off with the 2 foreground buildings. The Costa store was modeled from a reference, as seen below:

3D modeling progression of Costa café storefront with textures, awnings, and seating in Corona renders.

Here was the pizza shop. In this case, the interior is just a texture map on a CoronaLightMtl:

3D modeling process of Pizza Express storefront with textures, lighting setup, and renders in Corona.

Additional lighting was added inside the buildings to help the water reflections on the street. They are just basic Corona lights:

op-down 3D wireframe layout of building interiors with lighting setup and furniture arrangement.

Some street props I modeled myself and others were modified models from various websites that offer free models:

Corona material node setup for sewer plate with displacement maps and rendered manhole cover preview.
3D render of Barclays city bikes docked at a bike rack station with blue branding and signage.

3D model of building facades with brick and gray textures created for Morning After the Rain scene.

With those props added, it was time for another test render:

Rainy street render with Costa café, Pizza Express, bike rack, and fire hydrant under overcast lighting.
It’s almost there! Now time to add more details:

3D scene setup of rainy street with Costa café, Pizza Express, bike rack, fire hydrant, cars, and bus.
Top-down 3D view of rainy street scene layout with Costa café, Pizza Express, cars, bus, and bike rack.

Render settings

There is nothing to say about the render settings, as nothing is changed from the default Corona settings – goodbye to tweaking material/light/shadows samples!

Volumetric fog was added to get the ‘morning’ look, and I applied some LUT & color correction in Corona VFB:

Corona render setup panel showing volumetric material, LUT tone mapping, bloom, and glare settings.

Here is the final clay and raw render:

Clay render of rainy street scene with Costa café, Pizza Express, bikes, cars, and trees before texturing.
Final photoreal render of rainy street with Costa café, Pizza Express, bike rack, cars, and wet cobblestones.

Then to complete everything, some color correction and grading in Photoshop / After Effects:

Final graded render of rainy street with Costa café, Pizza Express, fire hydrant, and Barclays bikes.
Close-up render of rainy street with fire hydrant, Barclays bikes, wet cobblestones, and fallen leaves.
Wide render of Costa café and Pizza Express storefronts with rainy cobblestone street and reflections.

About Corona

I have to say, Corona made a huge difference in my workflow. In this project, the materials & lighting were the real challenge. Corona’s fast and responsive Interactive Rendering dramatically improved the quality of the final output, otherwise it would have been a real pain to tweak the wet materials to get the desired look without it.

And that’s it! I hope you find this making-of helpful in some way. Thanks for reading!

Shabeer
mvshabeer.wixsite.com/3dartist
https://mvshabeer.artstation.com/
chaos logo
Get Chaos news, tips, and inspiration every month.
Subscribe to the blog
Modern living room interior with a light gray sofa, yellow throw blanket, wooden coffee table with a cup and biscuits, blue rug, patterned curtains, and potted plant.
Share
Chaos Corona behind the scenes Tips & Tricks archviz
Tom Grimes
Tom Grimes

Tom is the Product Manager for Chaos Corona. Before joining the team in 2016, he worked in the industry as a freelance 3D artist, programmer, and additionally worked for 10 years as a marketing specialist for other 3D software companies. He specializes in 3D illustration and animation.

Subscribe to Our Blog

Get the best tips and articles delivered straight to your inbox!

blog-subscribe-large-cta-bg