Tokyo Resturant

Introduction

The project I have chosen to take to the end of the year will be a City Environment. The subject will be selected from the different depictions represented in the book "Le botteghe di Tokyo" by Mateusz Urbanowicz.

The peculiarity will be that I will graphically try to recreate precisely the author's watercolour style to recreate a 2D effect in a Game ready 3D Environment.

Reference

Initially, I looked for all illustrations representing stores and glimpses of old Japanese stores that could be feasible in 3D.

After a bit of research as well as finding a general line on the type of setting I wanted to create, I looked for other references, again by the same author, for create game Environment.

Objective

The main goals I wanted were to try to recreate the artist's characteristic watercolour effect on paper, create a game-ready environment, and try to make it as light as possible.

Obstacle

The main obstacles I found in the creation of my project were:

- The creation of the watercolour effect on paper

- Substance Designer

- Unreal Engine 5

Substance Designer

To recreate the watercolour effect in textures, I started by looking at how Substance Designer works. A specific program for creating textures. To get started, I followed the playlist of Adobe Substance's official tutorials on YouTube to learn how it works and get a friendly first approach.

-First test

-Second and Final test

The result although far from my intended style gave me an excellent comprehensive basis for the program.

Watercolor on Paper Effect

For the watercolour effect, I have looked up many tutorials and a variety of artists who have tried to reproduce a style similar to the one I am aiming for. After seeing their work I realized that to recreate the desired style I will have to change Engines and learn how to use specific Programs.

First I wanted to recreate the watercolour effect because it could be the biggest problem. Given the opportunity to choose my own holiday tasks, I opted to use this time to do a lot of testing and to create an effect as close as possible to that of reference.

In creating the brushes, I went on to create simple initial shapes and then went on to mix them with patterns already present in the program.

Colors

For the colours, I chose gradients of blue for personal convenience.

Union of Strokes

For the colours, I chose gradients of blue for personal convenience.

Wet Brush Effect

With this effect, I took the map I had created and went to mix the colours and created the blended colour effect typical of watercolours.

Patches of Colors

For this effect, I went to recreate the effect that occurs when a brush is too wet and creates spots with sharp and darker edges.

Paper Effect

For the paper effect, I went to look for the type of paper used by the author

( SAUNDERS WATERFORD BLOCK 41X31 300G/MQ 20FF FINE GRAIN HW )

and I went to get the texture of the same sheets used by him, tail it and then combined it with the created effect this is the result.

Production of Models

For the modelling, after choosing the final reference, I started modelling in Blender.

The modelling itself took 5 days, during which I also had to search for images on the internet of the building because the author's reference was only frontal.

The final assembly includes 77 models, all within 3 atlases, divided into building models and props, glass, and vegetation.

Unreal Engine

Initially, the choice of the program was to recreate the setting that had fallen on Unity. Having worked on it for 3 years I was pretty sure it might be the best choice given my previous experience and the style chosen. But after seeing many works of other artists I was able to ascertain that to be able to recreate my chosen style the best option is to use Unreal as the engine for the project. Moreover, since the projects we will be doing at school this year will be done on the same graphics engine, I preferred to choose the same engine to learn as much as possible simultaneously.

Instead after seeing various tutorials and environments made in style very similar to the one sought I saw that to achieve the desired style I will have to learn how to use the Substance Designer program to recreate the watercolour style as faithfully as possible. However, this will mean that I will have more difficulty in achieving the desired style and it will take more time in recreating it faithfully.

On Unreal I concentrated on creating the Cell-Shader effect through material in Post-Processing