Environment Art - Canal Plaza

This environment is my 3rd personal project at learning Unreal Engine, deeply inspired by Dishonored game series. I was able to keep working on it for two months straight and deliver the final result. The game level delivers the mood of the industrial spain setting. In addition to the game inspiration, many details were inspired by a spanish 19-20th Century architect Josep Domènech i Estapà, Certain assets were recreated from an CosmoCaixa and Edificio Catalana de Gas i Electricitat in Barcelona. 

Gathering references

This project was made possible due to an extensive amount of references collected. Living in barcelona is an advantage - I took days to walk around the city and photograph the architecture, street views and minor world details + visited few museums

Over 900 photo references were collected. 

My Workflows

I used a variety of different workflows which seemed appropriate for a certain task. For buildings I decided to create a variety of simple modular assets, which I could kitbash together and achieve different results. Same workflow was used for Pipes, Ballustrades and Railings. 

The central streets were done naturally, with non-uniform ground and pavement created in Blender. 

For most of my assets and props I used a Low-Poly Weighted Normal, Non-Destructive workflow. With the help of a modifier stack I could easily create smooth edges to catch the highlights and edit the geometry, updating the modifiers in real time.

Vegetation

Vegetation was created while on a two week break in Slovenia, away from my computer. I only had a small laptop that could barely handle photoshop. Due to the lack of processing power I decided to use photo textures for vegetation. I went outside, gathered a bunch of leafs and branches and started capturing. I found an LED screen for hand animation, which I never used. It was great for capturing translucency, after correcting the perspective I packed all leafs into a single atlas. 

Variety of Assets Created for the Project. To enhance the performance all wood objects share the same Texture Atlas, as well as Metal parts and smaller stones. The boulders use UDIMs to keep the quality.

Materials

For most materials I used Zbrush and Substance Painter, Pavement and Tiling Materials were composed out of a variety of created stone assets, which were previously sculpted in zbrush and painted in substance : ). For some materials: ground and Decals I used Photoshop to clean the seams and generate texture maps. For each material I Packed Ambient Occlusion, Roughness and Metalic into a single ORM texture

Creation of custom Master Maetrials for the use of Vertex colors and Height Blending allowed me to add variation to large scale walls and ground, which otherwise would tile repeatedly.

Additional Variation to the level was done with Decals - I used Phototextures for ornaments, Painted leaks in substance Painter with the leaks brushes and Created custom wall Paintings. (Initially I planned to turn them into posters, but trying them as decals on the walls helped me decide on their role in the level. 

If I had More Time...

I would be able to notice minor shader mistakes and fix them

I would rework the collision Meshes for the objects in the level

I would give more attention to the brick building, since it had a lot of potential to add more variation to the scene, so I would replace one or two of the main buildings with that. 

I would create LODs for dense meshes, such as foliage, trees, metal details and wooden parts.

I would figure out Decal Blending for only Color, Roughness, or Normal to make sure paint would not replace the bumpiness of brick walls. 

I would play more with the Cameras and editing of the presentation video clip. 

I would create more types of vegetation, since I barely used half of my created Atlas. 

I would create my own effects for dust and steam instead of default Unreal particles. 

Feel free to Comment and give a feedback on what else could have been fixed.