Old town

I grew up in stockholm and have always loved the architecture in the old town and therefore i took heavy inspiration from there. I used the game genshin impact as a style inspiration and took time too look at and study the textures in the game. I gathered references not only for specifics but also the general vibe that i wanted to achieve. When blocking out i used unreal and I already had a vague idea of the composition that i wanted to have so i tested out some variation and kept on iterating on it throughout the project to finally land on the one i did.

One of the early blockouts made in unreal

When creating the modular house parts i focused on making it possible to quickly switch them out and make fast variations with different colors, windows and door designs. For the texturing i baked texture maps in substance painter but then painted my base color in photoshop to achieve the exact look that i wanted. The walls had a normal map that i created in substance designer but a base color made in photoshop. I created a projection master material using material functions for the walls and other tileable textures such as the roof and cobblestone in order to get seamless transitions between parts as well as making different variations. 

Material function for triplanar projection materials.

The props were all textured in the same way as the house parts.

The softweres that i used were maya for modeling, Zbrush for highpolys, substance designer, painter and photoshop for texturing and unreal for blockout and presentation. 

I wanted to create a contrast between the night outside and the warm and inviting inside therefore i chose the warm orange and the blue colors. I still kept the shadows soft and the blue a bit more calm to create a mysterious environment rather than a scary or hostile outside.

Video with effect.