Gangster's Safe House (Sleeping Dogs Fan Art)

Aristeidis

For my University course we had to prepare a piece of art for our portfolio.
I chose to model the first safe house of Sleeping Dogs but a bit different, based on a concept art by Stuart Ng.



BLOCKOUT

Firstly, I started by making a very basic Blockout of the scene. I had to be careful to position the assets as close as possible with the concept art and I had to consider the type of camera lens which where use for this CA. For further reference I searched on the internet and I found a second image of the scene and also a Youtube video in which I could see the flat from many different angles.



Youtube Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dbvyzBXg_w



List of Assets

My next step was to list all the assets of the CA and put them in categories according to the part of the apartment where they were placed.



References for the assets

After listing my assets, I spent some time searching images which were going to help me with modeling the assets, images which were showing me not only the whole model but also small or hidden areas which were hard to figure out how to model.
Is important to find the right references now to save some time later. I keep on mind the type of decals that I am going to use later to complete the look of the scene. I left the lighting process for the end.

So finally the fan part started and I began by modeling the main area of the apartment, starting from making the walls which I had to see how I am going to break them down first.

Main wall:



Kitchen wall:



Small living room / balcony walls:



Main Ceiling:




Small living room / balcony Ceiling:



Small living room / balcony Windows:


I left the glass untextured because I was going to use a Master material inside UE4 for this.

Plastic behind windows:



Windows protection
 
This object is not going to be visible in the scene but I need to make some cool shadows from them.


Spend some good amount of time to find some nice Chinese images and newspapers for the inside part of the windows.

Wooden Bridge And Wooden Bathroom




For the floor I used Substance Designer to make the 3 different tiling patterns, one for the main apartment, one for the balcony and one for the bathroom.

Kitchen Floor:





Balcony Floor:





Bathroom floor:





Main door of the apartment:



Now the apartment is done, there aren't any open areas and so far it looks like this in UE4.

Aristeidis

And so I continued adding all the assets with the following row:

Ceiling lights:



First one is the kitchen light and the second one is a ceiling light for the hall and for the bedroom / balcony. I used a blueprint in UE4 so I can make changes on it easier.

 



The next models that I made were mostly furniture assets like the closet and sockets; I did some models for the ceiling as well such as pipes and the ceiling fan. Later on I made a blueprint for the cables on the ceiling and generally for electric devices; cable.







Models are without lightmaps, so all the models are in static mobility. 
As I was building the lights and the reflection speres I realised that my ceiling didin't have any lighting at all. After searching a lot, my supervison found a way to fix these weird shadings by applying two boxes exaclty around the scene, one additive and one subtractive.




With that way I made sure that no lighting is coming inside the flat.

Aristeidis

For all the models I used Substance Painter as the main software of texturing. Zbrush was also helpful especially for the punching bag, clothes and bed.


I made the punching bag in 3ds Max and I imported the high poly model to Zbrush to add some more detail. 


After that I imported the low and high poly models into Substance Painter for the baking/ texturing process.


 In the beginning I tried to make the clothes on 3ds Max and I tried to use the cloth modifier to pose them with the help of the closet and hangers as collusion objects. After some tests I realised that I wouldn't have a nice result from 3ds Max for this task. So I tried Marvelous Designer. I made some basic clothes ( a jacket, t-shirts and shirt) and I wanted to try and pose them to make them look as they look on the CA. I thought that Marvelous Designer could use only characters as avatars, but after importing the hangers and the closet I realised that a hanger can work as an avatar as well and the result was brilliant and very fast.



For the bed I made everything on 3ds Max and I used the cloth modifier to give a nice shape to the sheets and the pillows. After that, I imported them in Zbrush to tweak some areas and make a smoother high poly model for the baking.

For the carpet I used Parallax Occlusion to make it look more "bumped/fluffy".


A good tutorial to show you how to do it is the following one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hoT8fJJgoU