Stylized Cappadocia Preproduction
In 2021 I had finished my stylized chaparral project and wanted to follow it up with something bigger and better than I had ever made before. I wanted to leave behind my organics-first way of thinking and make something that showed not just that I could model architecture, but that I could design new architecture styles. I also wanted to make a full game space like you would see in a first-person map, complete with multiple routes, interior and exterior spaces, props, and an epic backdrop.
To say that I bit off more than I could chew would be an understatement. What resulted was me adopting the mentality that, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, “to make a game environment from scratch, you must first become a tech artist.” Building a full environment at scale with architecture and props made me completely rethink how I had been modeling things thus far. I tried making backdrop mountains and ended up learning Houdini. I tried making a modular building kit and ended up building a set of geometry nodes for generating everything from vert colors to decals and trims. I tried doing baked GI and ended up going on a multi-weekend tangent picking apart Unreal’s many lighting systems in an attempt to deconstruct basic baked lighting. I tried designing architecture and ended up reading biographies on Frank Lloyd Wright. I spent a LOT of time in Substance Designer.
Four years later, the Cappadocia project is still not close to finished. After I wrap some of the things I wanted to do with my tools I will return to it. For now, enjoy this slice of preproduction hell.
Overview of the scene
View from the courtyard
View from inside the hotel
WIP building kit
Not quite a "beautiful corner" but I wanted to make a simple building that displayed the key features of the architecture style.
Tiling material blends
Building orthos. The hotel at the top is the main building, surrounded by outbuildings that were built in ancient times and renovated with contemporary features like solar panels.
More explorations for the building style.
Making a poster for the cafe by rendering a scene in Blender and painting over it in Photoshop.
Painting of Atatürk. One of these hangs in every home in Turkey so of course I had to paint my own.
Blend test between rock texture sets.
Early Designer mats.
Organics kit I built as part of a CGMA class with Traghan Monohan.
Final render for the CGMA organics class I took.
Plant cards made by baking maps from a sculpt and compositing in Photoshop.
Organics reference I shot on a 2017 trip to Turkey.
Mood board for the organics kit.
Process for a mosaic tile. I looked into doing this in Substance but I couldn't get the thick-to-thin shapes I wanted so I drew it in Photoshop.
More diffuse maps painted in Photoshop.
Backdrop in Unreal. An Unreal terrain with maps baked from Houdini, layered with rock structures that were baked from Houdini highpolys and a few plants I made in Blender/Photoshop. It was fun to learn the Houdini highpoly-to-lowpoly flow.
Different types of backdrop rock structures I generated in Houdini.
Brainstorming in the sketchbook.
Bunch of lunch break and coffee shop doodles. Good for working through ideas and planning what I want to do when I'm back at the computer.
Honestly there's a lot more than this even.
Okay one more.