As always, my process started with gathering reference images that light the environment's life.  I separated them into groups to be organized. Vegetation was very important and I researched the plants that live on these types of lands.

Since the most important and main hero asset is Red Rocket, I wanted to focus on it. I modelled it precisely and made it very detailed. The heaviest part of the asset in terms of polygons is the metal panel part which surrounds the roof part.  The reason for that is sculpting those pieces and bending them to give a scrap-looking effect. I also made and textured the clean version of the asset, it's cheaper than this model.

After that, I grouped pieces with their relevance. For example,  Rocket piece was grouped with the metal supporters. Windows, frames and garage doors were grouped etc. In this way, I saved a lot of video memory in the Unreal Engine Because I didn't create materials for every piece. This method also makes easier of other people's lives who ever use the same asset because it's very easy to find which part is which and for material assigning process.

Since the model has so many parts and it's not very close to the camera I didn't unwrapped it by hand. I used Maya's auto-unwrap feature to do that.  I used planar projection to texture it so I didn't worry about the seas and orientation of the UV shells.  The only thing I considered was texel density.  Using this method saved me an immersive amount of time, and it still looks great. I also packed some of the texture maps to save a little bit of VRAM in Unreal Engine.

In order to make the landscape assets I used sculpting and simulation. Firstly, I sculpted the geos in Maya then exported these geos into the Houdini to create a height map that I can use in Gaea. After that, I shaped them however I wanted in Gaea then exported them into Houdini back. The reason for that was making different LODs and retopology of the terrain assets. In addition, For the hero terrain, I used a different technique. I sculpted it in Maya and then exported it into Houdini. I made UDIMs as 2x2 to get a higher resolution at the end. And for the texturing of this specific terrain I used substance painter.

I rendered the image using pathtracer and OCIO enabled. ACES colour space was used in Nuke.  Since my hardware is not powerful enough (RTX3070) I couldn't use the highest settings of pathtracer. For that reason, you see some white dots in the render. In order to enhance the look of the scene I used Nuke to colour grade and composite city element that I made in Maya previously. Both Platte and Element have render passes of course. After all these processes it got its final shape.