Hackney Weightlifting Club

For the intermediate term at Think Tank Training Center the final assignment was to create (part of) a room, based on concept art (or in this case a picture). 

I wanted to make an old-school-style weightlifting gym and found one in Hackney, London, through Instagram. I contacted the people who run the club and they were so kind to take some pictures for me (Thank you Daphney!) I chose 1 picture which had the best combination of lighting, mood and props. The other ones had either no window, too many (non-weightlifting related) props or just didn't appeal to me as much. 

At first the number of props was a bit overwhelming but I ended up grouping them, which ended up being a good starting point for texture atlasing later on. I finished all the modeling before I went on to texturing everything.

After a first pass of texturing I did a first pass of lighting which took me a full day. After that I spent the time alternating between lighting and texturing, going more and more into detail. Having a photo as a reference really helped me nail the lighting which in total took me about a week. This is my first scene in Unreal so it took some getting used to.

I learned a whole lot during this time and I really enjoyed working on this project. It was fun getting to see the scene come to life and I'm really happy with the result.