Finally, the update that is so truly overdue, it’s not even remotely funny anymore. I had actually decided I wouldn’t make this final post wrapping up the cyberpunk project, especially given how long ago it was. However, given the tone of my last post, and the warm response I had received through the DiNusty community and even a few artstation DMs sharing similar stories, I decided this series of blog posts deserves an actual (quite happy) ending to give some closure and cap it off.

Like the legend of the phoenix

So the good news up front: Back in the dying days of May, I finished my Cyberpunk Subway project!  After all the struggles and loss of motivation balancing my day job with personal work in a covid world (discussed in my last post), there came a point a few weeks after where I hadn’t really touched or thought about the project for a while. I was getting the itch to get back into some personal work, and realised that I had a pretty cool environment piece that was about 60% of the way done - so it wouldn’t make any sense to start another project from scratch and lose all that time and effort I had put in right? And that's exactly what old James would have done!
I sat down and worked out a new plan and set of priorities to finish off the project in about two weeks. What assets would need the most work? What could be cut? How could I shortcut lengthy modeling or texturing time by leveraging in-engine decals, tileable Megascans, vertex blending, borrowing vfx from the Epic example content etc. It is absolutely not lost on me that the two week crunch that I planned was really the exact process that I should have been doing during the challenge timeframe, but let’s not dwell on that now shall we? This is 2020: THE YEAR OF FINISHING THINGS remember?? (but also lol, 2020 has enough going on for it without my personal art agenda weighing it down).

All ends with beginnings

The first item I prioritised tackling was the big one - the big hole in the roof to be precise. Early in the blockout I had really liked the shape and lines that it brought to the scene, and I wanted to give a hint to the larger world that this subway existed in. However, with these new self-imposed time constraints, I was really worried if it would be possible to pull off properly. In my haste, I blocked out a distance quality background building and chucked some emissive colours on the mesh - but really didn’t like how it looked. I had rushed to a solution without really considering how the building fit the context of the larger scene I was trying to create. I then tried removing the skylight completely, experimenting with smaller skylights, bringing the big skylight back etc. Although it was becoming a bit of a problem for me to resolve, I adored the light shafts I could create with the skylight to really draw to the focal point of the scene.
Eventually, after drawing back from my references, I created a really low poly above-ground motorway and used that to break up the line of sight of my shoddy distance building mesh. It had completely the effect I wanted; hinting that the subway exists as a lower level of some twisting urban centre of skyscrapers with motorways weaving between. The skylight was one of my favourite parts of the scene so to finally resolve it in a way that felt natural to the scene was a huge motivational boost for me.

I had planned to do a small set of modular props, most of which would use trimsheets, while a few would use unique bakes and textures. The fare machine and ticket gates were unique unwrapped high to low baked props, while I ended up doing the police bollards as a mid-res prop, but making sure to create appropriate LODs in Unreal.

I used Quixel Mixer to create a trimsheet for the piping, as well as trimsheet for the tactile sidewalk tiles - which turned out to be my favourite material on this project. I created the capsule shapes heightmap in photoshop (after trying to work out for far too long how to cleanly create a similar shape in Mixer) but apart from that, layering on the materials from scans and creating wear and damage was extremely fast, easy and fun! I’m not yet convinced by Mixer as a real Substance Painter rival for texture painting, but I love it for easy, fast and honestly FUN material creation, while leveraging the amazing Megascans. I’ll definitely be using it again on my future Unreal projects.

What keeps the planet spinning

The Megascans plugin for unreal also comes with a real handy layered vertex blending material, that I used as the base material for the floors and walls. I created and exported the base material in Mixer, and then layered on damage, cracks, wear etc in Mixer and exported these variants to use in the layered Unreal material. By piping the texture export directly into Unreal’s asset folder, it became incredibly quick to iterate on the materials in both UE4 and Mixer: I would paint in some vertex layering in Unreal, alt-tab over to Mixer and fiddle with some parameters, hit export and alt-tab back to Unreal where the updated textures were already being loaded and displayed in the viewport. With this workflow, I was able to really quickly experiment and work out a lot of the colour palette of the main components of the scene, which I had been putting off far too long.
Once I was pretty happy with my tiling materials, I did a pass of vertex painting to break up the repeating patterns, and add a bit of storytelling - the charring outside the clinic door for example. I also took advantage of the decals and scatter assets in the Megascans library to add a bunch of trash and further pattern break up really quickly. I then did a final pass of ‘vandalism’; paint splashes (alphas from megascans again) and some spray paint graffiti I created in Photoshop.

All in all, the final two weeks finishing off the project were hugely fun and rewarding. Once I overcame the skylight problem, I felt like I developed a sense of momentum that carried me through the remaining time. Although it was still really hard working so much before and after my day job, seeing so many different elements come together in such a short span of time definitely helped. I also made sure to post almost daily WIP screenshots to a smaller art discord myself and some friends started. It was partially to get feedback from a group of colleagues I trust, but also to “keep me honest” along the way (the DiNusty discord had long ago moved on from the challenge remember!!)

The force from the beginning

After the fact, I can pretty confidently say it’s my most polished project to date, but there’s still many areas I want to improve in myself and my skills, so I think I might keep my next few projects to some props and smaller pieces with a real focus on refining those aspects. Also as soon as I finally put the ArtStation post went live, a friend IMMEDIATELY informed me I misspelled “medical” on the in-game sign asset, so that probably took the biggest emotional toll on me tbh.
Also did you like the Daft Punk headings? Gosh I'm so a r t right now.