World of Warcraft - Stormwind Reimagined (WIP)

My goal with this project was to create a reimagined version of the trade district of Stormwind from World of Warcraft. I wanted to recreate the city as if it had been attacked and overrun by the scourge.

Stills in Substance Painter

To start I created several layouts that would serve as a graybox. In this design which I ultimately went with I wanted to have a lower level that included the general goods stores as well as the inn, and an upper level with the combat-specific stores.

I then drew a crude concept for each building on paper and made notes for details I wanted to adjust in the final product. Some of the buildings are from the game, others are original concepts.

Once the concepts were complete I made a blockout that would help me lock in the sizes of each building so that I could get a silhouette of the area before I moved onto modeling.

From there I would model each building and place it in its space in the blockout. This is the building concepted in the picture above. This also was a good opportunity to start testing color.

Once the buildings were in place I adjusted the placement of certain structures to make sure everything fit and had a silhouette I was happy with.

From there I moved onto UV Mapping and texturing each model using Substance Painter. I utilized the ivy brush to paint on foliage. In the future I plan to model foliage over some of the areas with ivy to give the buildings more depth.

The more difficult assets proved to be the large scale castle walls and towers, which required a more optimized UV Layout as well as utilizing a higher texture resolution. To do this I modeled parts of the castle together and then broke them up.

I then moved all of the assets into Unity so I could make sure everything was working properly.

One of my goals with this project was to optimize the poly count of each model so that it would run efficiently. Above is an example of the poly count of the light posts seen throughout the city.

It is satisfying to see the end result of a low-poly model after it has been textured, the difference is staggering!

Overall I am happy with the results so far but there is a lot more to do! I intend to add dense foliage, damaged signs, rubble, and things like crates and barrels to fill space.