//HANSA

//HANSA is my tribute to Hamburg, Germany, a city I lived in for three years and where my mind still wanders when I’m feeling nostalgic. I wanted to depict a near-future version of the city where technology and tradition coexist.

This piece also became a practical testbed for the geometry node tools I've been developing. I used my own custom tools to generate all of the railings, shingles, pipes, wires, and trims in a way that's nondestructive and easy to modify, a necessity as the layout of the scene evolved heavily over production.

//HANSA was made in Unreal 4.27 with all baked lighting. The water shader is 'Cartoon Water Shader' by SandVector Studios. The skybox is a painted over version of the default Unreal sky. Everything else I made myself including the posters and street art- no premade models or image generators were used.

Thanks to all the friends who gave me feedback on this, and to my partner for providing encouragement and snacks.

This tool was used for most trims in the scene. It's also used for wires, pipes, and railings.

The tool takes a profile shape and lofts it along a series of edges. The vertical UV component is stored on the profile shape as a vertex float attribute. The horizontal UV component is generated based on the length of the edges.

Trim tool used for wires. You can optionally mask off edges you don't want brackets generated on.

Shingle tool. Arrays a repeating mesh along a spline and deforms it.

Trim tool used for railings.

Trim tool used for the gate.

Reference - early in the project I assembled a reference board of photos from my time in Hamburg and picked out what I considered to be visual hallmarks. Nautical themes, ornate first story landings, posters, murals, and bicycles were all must-haves.

I did a lot of street view research and gradually settled around Berhadt-Nocht Strasse, where residential neighborhoods elbow up against the business district, as a primary reference.

A selection of textures and my trimsheet. These were generally made in Photoshop or Designer and frequently started in Designer with a finishing pass in Photoshop.