A while back, I’ve worked on creating a new environment: a piece of city in which various characters will be placed. We’ve decided on making an alley just off a main street, at night. My goal was to capture the feel of a shady bar, where crooks and outlaws go to have a drink and scheme.
Using Vlad’s concept here as a starting point, I made a rough block-out.
Vlad used this to further enhance the concept and immerse himself in the environment.
I then started roughing in the main pieces of the scene, using this new art and some more images I found that felt that could help me find interesting shapes and construct a more believable environment.
I decided that I wouldn’t bake any normal maps. Instead, I would try the workflow I talked about a while back here. So with that in mind, I started detailing my block-out.
After some more work, when I considered the modelling almost done, I took the model to Marmoset Toolbag, for a quick lighting test. Since the software is really simple, it only took me a few minutes to try out a quick lighting scenario and test what works and doesn’t.
A few days later I had the whole piece broken up and UV’d, ready for texturing. By this stage I’ve migrated the Unreal Engine 4 and made a few changes to the geometry that made the whole piece read better.
In Substance Designer I created a basic brick and concrete material, to check the feel of the large shapes. I then moved to Substance Painter where I started to lay the foundation to my materials and do a simple detailing pass.
All the normal detailing was done in Substance Painter using alpha masks or just simple panelling with the basic brush.
In Unreal Engine I started working on the lighting. Iteration was pretty easy and fast, so I came to a decent result in quite a short time.
I then moved on to detailing and adding more elements to shape the atmosphere. For this I created decals like water puddles, concrete cracks, water leaks on the walls. Then I added fog and revamped the lighting for a more dramatic and cyberpunk look and feel.
After this came the finishing touches. A couple of more decals of grime and some newspapers were added. Steam emerged from the vents, accompanied by small props like cigarette packs and broken bottles. They aimed at enhancing the sense of scale.
This, coupled with a few post effects, concluded my work on the scene.
Article written by Doru But
This article was originally published here.
