Production Development

This was quite the rollercoaster of trying to fix UVs to understanding how these UVs affect the outcome in Substance Painter.

Lamp Process

To begin with, I modelled a lamp post inspired by one of my drawings. Overall the process for the street furniture was very quick and easy.

 Now, I didn't use an orthograph to create the lamp due to it being just cubes combined together. The process for the lamp head itself was simple. All I did was highlight the top vertexes and transform them to make it wider. Then I extruded the top to give it that shape of the lamp. Next I highlighted the faces on the sides and extruded those in wards before using the extract tool to have UVs separate for the glass panes.

Then, I UV mapped each segment, ready to be textured in Substance Painter. Below I have included screenshots for the UVs for this lamp.

Next part for this lamp was to texture it in substance painter. The simplest way of doing this was to apply the bright steel shader onto the metal parts of the street lamp. I also shaded it in on a separate layer as a personal preference.

For the glass panes, I used the glass visor with my shader setting set to metal with alpha blending before lowering the opacity to make it more transparent. I used this same glass technique for my windows in my main buildings texture. 

Bin Process

Following after this, I began to model my bin. Again, I didn't use an orthographic for it because my design is very cubic already. So again, similar process, I just extruded my cube and then used the bevel tool to make it appear more smooth and organic. I had some issues figuring out how I was supposed to UV unwrap this because of the amount of cubes but eventually I got there with it.

After importing it into substance painter, I placed a bright steel smart texture over it and coloured it white-light grey, following the style of my researched artist.

Buildings Process

Now it comes down to modelling the actual buildings. This was the longest process, especially the UV unwrapping. 

First, I blocked out the scene very vaguely. I needed an understanding on how tall and wide I wanted my buildings as well as the placement of street furniture, etc.

After extruding the buildings to get the general shapes I wanted, I ran into an issue with the roof which I eventually managed to fix with the bridge tool. I made sure the building on the left had 4 subdivisions so that I could then extrude inwards to create the windows.

At this point, I have modelled exactly how I wanted my scene to look like. So I began UV unwrapping everything, getting it ready to be textured. 

During this point, I ran into an issue. All of my UV maps were connected together which made the painting process and applying textures significantly more difficult. I realised now that I should've used the extract tool for the door frames, window frames, walls, roof, etc, to make texture them separately from each other, but it was too late when I made this realisation so I improvised.

I had simply painted on and erased over the models, which slowed down the production process slightly. I made the roof using the metal brush for two buildings and painted the wood on with the wood texture. I easily just applied paint brushed smart material on the pink building and changed the colour to a very pale pink. I decided to go for very light shades for these buildings similar to how Sou Fujimoto's structures were white or wooden.

The shortest part was applying raw grey concrete for the road and concrete cast for the pavement to make it look bumpy. 

Putting it all together

I placed all the assets together into the maya scene. After exporting all the textures, I used the "Apply to Workflow" function to actually apply the textures in Maya.

I went into hypershade and selected the corresponding texture to each model. It looked a little bit like this:

For the final touch and to create a render, I placed a cube inside the streetlights and went to Arnold > Lights > Mesh Light.

These are the settings I used for the mesh light. I wanted to set my scene at night because I wanted it to be more atmospheric and I really wanted to showcase these streetlamps in use.

This is the image I imported onto my skydome light to give it that dark lighting. I found it on the Adobe stoke image website.