Blockout and breaking the symmetry

The first thing that you can realize when you take a look to the main ref, is that the composition is mostly symmetric and the symmetric is quite interesting but in the end is mostly boring, so I had to break it with broken shapes, stuff and details… and finally with the lighting.

After that, I took my ref-poly-man, that I usually use to get a good feel of proportions and started the block-out of the scene. When I had few things, like main walls, the doors holes, and simple stairs, I continued with adding the camera in Maya and trying to get the perspective and exporting the scene in order to check that everything was working well. After that, I started to place more stuff in the scene like the carpets of the sides, to get the felling of depth, also rough stairs, the window…

The scene is really small and the goal of the project was to take some pictures from the scene, so I didn’t need to work with modular pieces. I decided to make it with big meshes but keeping in mind the materials and lightmaps, because I didn’t want meshes with a lot of materials and on another hand, I wanted to have the possibility of defining the quality of the lightmaps to optimize the scene. In the end, I had meshes like the main walls with the ceiling, second floor, the walls of the rooms, the stairs, the frames and skirting boards, the window… But the other things, like doors, props, the ivy, debris… were placed in UE to play with them.