Details

As I mentioned above, I made sure to spend extra time on that one building, even though it was not going to be the main building, he would define the look of the whole scenes. The architecture is heavily inspired on Venice, I love how they have cables running through the outside of the buildings or how pretty much every single first floor in town has metal bars blocking the windows, probably to avoid burglary. Those small details are there for a reason and are what bring so much character to a street, or city. So I tried to copy some of those elements, and create some of my own.

As for my workflow, MODO was extremely helpful, I was able to model and most importantly, unwrap my models really fast with the help of the right macros and scripts.

Vegetation

When doing a project with so much detail on your own, is important to save time where you can, so my idea with the vegetation was to fit as much as I could inside one texture sheet and populate the street with that. So I first modeled the high poly versions on MODO, bake it down to a plane and textured using substance painter. The most optimal way of doing the large foliage pieces would be to bake down large branches and clumps so you could save on triangle count, but that is not what I was worried here, and was still able to maintain stable frame rate on the map, so I was ok with that.