Venetian City

For this piece, I wanted to really push myself and the limits of my software/hardware to create a truly immersive environment. I knew that this meant that I had to create a lot of different assets but I needed to decide on a location. I decided to create a city from scratch and landed on Venice because it was one of the most astonishingly mesmerizing places I’ve ever been. I visited Venice a few years ago in 2018 with two of best friends and it struck me as such a unique and fascinating city. The fact that there are no roads and that the main form of transportation was via boat and waterways seems was really enticing to me because it meant I got to create some maritime assets in addition to city blocks, two things I’ve never done before. One striking thing about Venice is how the canals nest a lot of the infrastructure that people interact with (tables, chairs etc.) closer to the buildings and make it feel cozy. I have a vague memory of thinking that if I ever were to make another short/project, I would imbue it with the same feelings of closeness and warmth I felt four years ago in that City. For a bit more background, my great grandparents were Italian immigrants and I wanted to give a bit of personal touch of family history.

Beginnings

The first assets I tackled were the boats themselves. I wanted to have a couple of different types of boats in the scenery but got carried away and ended up making 10 different kinds of boats, most of which were planted in the scene in a few locations. I wanted to have a variety of simple row boats to old rusted fishing vessels to large scale vacation cruisers and of course gondolas which I actually ended up creating later on. You can see the main vessels in this picture here.

I ended up using ID mapping here for the first time and thought it was a really neat technique. It was particularly efficient because I could assign the same color maps to each boat and that way when I brought them into Substance Painter, most of the masking was already complete. Since I wanted them to all look distinct, I began with the hulls of each boat and stretched them into exaggerated forms of simple shapes and built detail on top of them. The ID mapping was crucial here because I could duplicate files with the same color schemes and most of the masking was already done by the time I brought files in for texturing.

Buildings and Cobbles

Next were the buildings. A majority of the inspiration for the buildings came from photo reference from my own travels in Venice. The background buildings and the street cobbles were tackled at the same time because I thought it would be a good way to learn how to use Maya’s MASH particle system. I was really interested in being able scatter different cobbles and then use ID maps again to texture them. Realizing the power of MASH and ID mapping was what really helped move this process along quickly.

As seen in the GIF to the left, the 12 different tile models were created all with random bumped surfaces to distinguish them from one another. They were then assigned a color ID and finally scattered using MASH onto a plane surface with rows left in between to duplicated generated patterns and then alter the originals. This process was really helpful in creating random looking tile patterns. The background cities were also dressed using a similar technique. On the right, window assets were modeled with multiple variations that included flower pots, window awnings, wire balconies and different sized windows. Issues came up with overlapping windows which was solved by doing 4 to 5 different iterations until no overlaps occurred.

Individual and Waterfront Buildings

With the blocking completed and the background buildings generated, the next process involved creating the more detailed buildings. These included the buildings that lined the cobbled streets as well ass the waterfront buildings. All of these buildings were created from photo reference taken from my own travels in Venice. The main building that was tackled first was the restaurant building. This was the building that I spent a lot of time on and wanted to give it the most embellishments that I could. I wanted to introduce a curved building in the scene that wraps around to the main canal.

To add a more personal touch, I wanted to imbue this part of the scene with a bit of family history. My great grandparents were Italian immigrants and had their own small market store called Meoli’s Market and if you look closely at the light blue awning it says “Meoli’s Italian Restaurant”. After completing most of the building I also wanted to create a piping network because I felt this was missing in the original model so I planned it out by tracing over a screenshot shown below.

As mentioned previous, heavy inspiration was taken from my own travels. Below is an example of the one of the main buildings which was inspired by an image I took at sunset which was also the main inspiration for the lighting and time of day of the entire scene. I had very fond memories of being in this place with my best friends and wanted to capture this moment again.

Maritime Assets and Set Dressing

One of the final steps in this process was creating all of the detail work and set dressing assets. In order to accomplish this a sub library of assets was created called Maritime Assets. These assets consisted primarily of barrels, boxes, buoys, poles, chairs, tables and vegetation. Considering the amount of buildings and empty streets in the scene, it was important to me that I did not just randomly plant these assets in the scene but that each on had a purpose in where it was placed. Drawing inspiration from my photos taken of empty Venetian sidewalks that run past the canals, I wanted to dress the set at for a time at dusk, right before dinner so that it would feel as though people were about to come out and start their evenings but were perhaps enjoying some time indoors first.

As can be seen, some chairs were still stacked, awaiting a morning rush, various boat related objects like life preservers and tackle boxes were placed behind the long dock right across from Meoli’s restaurant. This is all to communicate a sense of calm and easiness before the residents begin their night.

The image to the left shows all of the individual maritime assets that were created in the maritime asset library. This library contains roughly 50 different models all with individual textures that are meant to introduce a certain amount of clutter but also make the environment feel lived in and like everything has been used and has a specific purpose. I had a lot of fun making all of these assets and since it was a single file it was very easy to just reference in one file that contained all of these models and then duplicate them from the referenced file in Maya. Many of them ended up being in the water and being animated.

The final aspect of the process to really tie things together was using simulations to give everything some life. I thought it could be really fun to have some flags blowing in the wind and have realistic looking water that glistened with subtle reflections of the buildings and evening light. First I tackled the water. Since I do not have a ton of experience in simulation, I decided to go with a simple animated displacement map that was created in Redshift using a noise generator. The test shown below shows the gondola animated in some water. I had to tune the speed of the animation properly so it did not look too chaotic and it took a few test rendered animations to get just the right amount of water movement that I wanted.

Lastly, I thought it could be a fun touch to add some maritime flags into the scene. I think they are really colorful and interesting and not something you see very often. Here is a simulation of the flags blowing in a gentle breeze. I tried to tune the motion of the flags to match the amount of movement that was coming off of the water so this was a bit of a balancing act as well. All in all they really helped tie the scene together.