Abandoned Schoolhouse

This environment was a personal project. It was inspired by Steven Hirsch's photographs of this very building which you can see on his website http://www.stevehirschphoto.com. it ended up taking about four weeks, off and on.

I modelled my assets in Maya and did the bulk of my textures in Substance Designer/Painter, but this project was all about lighting for me. I'd yet to do an exterior scene so I picked something that was sparse in detail thinking that would be easier. I started with the grass and I don't think I did a bad job with it, I tried to stick to the reference and I built LODs for each piece to help with optimisation.

Then I started blocking out the building in Maya and breaking it up into pieces so that my light maps wouldn't be too low res. I made a few materials in Designer then set about texturing my assets either in Painter or directly in engine using shaders with vertex painting set up to vary them a bit. Lastly I used post processing to nail the lighting.