Vaporwave Mall Environment: Welcome to the After Hours Mall

Vaporwave Mall Environment: Welcome to the After Hours Mall

Welcome to the After Hours Mall, my final submission for 3D game art at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Enjoy a late night snack with your friends, shop out our exclusive stores, and don't forget to    c  h  i  l  l      o  u  t.

My goal for this project was to create a small section of a mall with a neon, Vaporwave aesthetic using modular assets and Unreal’s Lumen lighting system. Originally, I wanted to create a realistic scene with a pastel color scheme, but that goal evolved into a more simplified style for the models and a dark color scheme with heavy neons. The overall scene also evolved from an atrium surrounded by clothing shops to a food court with stores only on the upper floor and at the end for the anchor store.

I submitted this project as my final piece for my game art course.  I modeled every prop in this scene using Maya and Unreal's modeling tools.  I used textures from Substance 3D Sampler and textures.com.

I’ve been inspired by Vaporwave music and art for a while, so I really enjoyed creating this environment. The two musical pieces that inspired me the most were “Moonlight” by Surfing and “DASAEV” by Dooby Douglas.

My hero asset for this scene is the fountain.  When I was little, I always enjoyed throwing pennies into the fountain at my local mall, and now that I'm an adult I still enjoy visiting the fountain just to watch the water splash.  Since I've always gravitated towards the mall's fountain, I thought it also be a natural gravitation point for players wandering through the scene.

Originally, the fountain was edged in a dirty bronze texture, but after receiving feedback from professor about needing to give it more light, I decided it would be a lot more fun to outline the fountain in neon lights.  I also added pink neon lights to the water spouts and changed the color of the shooting water to draw more attention to the spraying water.  This choice was inspired by images of large water fountains using colored lights to change the color of the water.  I used Unreal's Niagra system to create the spraying water.

Lastly, I added a dolphin statue to the top of the fountain because the top seemed too bare.  Dolphins form a major aspect of Vaporwave imagery, so I felt that including a dolphin in the scene, especially near water, would make the scene more complete.