3D Cyberpunk Alley Environment

  

For the past few weeks, I've worked on creating a piece of the city in which the 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.

This was used by Vlad to further enhance the concept and get a feel for 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, as well as steam from the vents and some small props like cigarette packs and broken bottles to give a better sense of scale.

This, coupled with a few post effects, concluded my work on the scene.