Prototyping the city of San Francisco for a mobile game
Hi everyone, my nickname is b000001, I'm from Ukraine, my team of 2 people is creating a city for a mobile project and I want to share it with you.
We decided to use the method of creating buildings from photo textures that Rockstar used in their old games, for this we found a photographer who took over 35000 photos of almost 350 gigabytes of different photos of the city, so we can quickly create realistic buildings and not waste time on creating procedural textures. This was the best option for our purposes.
After that, we moved on to a simple prototype of the city, which we later reworked based on new ideas.
We optimized the pipelining for buildings so that one building would take no more than 2-3 days, along with collision and lods, and we also wrote additional scripts to speed up the workflow, which gave us a realistic timeline and understanding of how long it would take to create such a large location.
We also created landscapes by hand, using modular elements. But over time we started using procedural creation in Houdini based on a pre-designed pipeline.
We distributed responsibilities in the team in such a way that everyone is responsible for a certain part of the city creation. One person does the buildings, one person creates the landscape, one person optimizes the workflow, and one person creates a prototype of the future neighborhood. Our task in the beginning was to make sure that the team worked as smoothly as possible and that everyone's goals were the same.
In the process of creation we have constantly optimized our workflow so that the creation of new models takes less and less time and now we are scaling the team to finish the first city this year.
If you are interested in more information, I can answer your questions, Thank you 
My site https://cjworkshop.com/
My site https://cjworkshop.com/
My contact cjstudiowork@gmail.com
Replies
I hope its a racing game, we dont have any good racing games on nobile that dont look like crap.
Are you using open map with houdini like in the matrix awakens project?
I'm guessing you are using mesh decals for the road to get nice detail and also variation.
Good luck with your project, hope to see more soon!