Subway Station

this is my project "subway station", I did right after I finished my Computer Graphics Masterclass at Bigrock school. I did the 3D modelling and lighting with Maya, texturing with Substance Painter, and rendering with Arnold

This is the concept that was drawn by me over a year ago (back then I didn't even know I would be making 3D art by now) after I visited New York on my own for the first time. I had an amazing time and the city really inspired me so I drew this picture thinking about the things I saw in the subway. Later on after I finished my Master I remembered about this drawing so I decided it would be a good start for my very first project

This is the blocking of the project, there isn't much to say yet because... it's a blocking. I will say that everything in this project is meant to be looked at only from this angle, for example the train has no back, because you couldn't see it in the final render anyway. I made this decision in order to save me some time and energy and spend them on other matters that I will explain further.

Here I was still figuring out how to position everithing, especially the train. Also, figuring out how to model the train was probably the hardest part of this project, as I had never modeled something so elaborate before. I actually tried making it three times before I was satisfied with the result, the train in this render was my second attempt, which I decided to delete because the topology was a complete mess. 

With the train done and all the UVs in place, it was time to start thinking about lighting, which was harder than I anticipated  as I had never lit and interior before. In this render to obtain the foggy look I connected an aiAtmosphereVolume, which looked really cool but also made a lot of noise, so I was not 100% sure of this solution.

Later I tried to close off any entrance where external light (skydome) could be coming from, and everything looked very dark, because with the atmosphere volume if the light where any more than this the "fog" would take over the whole scene. so I decided to remove the node and add the fog effect in compositing.

Here is one of the last renders before the final touch-ups.

This is the last render before compositing.

Final result, hope you like it :)

Of course in order to do a good project you need references, so here is also the screenshot of my pure ref.