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Arcade Environment Remake, Update 1

Work In Progress / 15 June 2018

Back in late 2016, I began an Environment based on an old Arcade called Nickel City that I visited in Northbrook Illinois. It's a rather old place, with a crusty interior and some of the most archaic machines. I often visited the place when I was young since admission was a dollar and the currency was Nickels, often making many games cost less than a quarter. Five dollars can buy you quite a bit of entertainment for a modern day place like that, as well as the large amount of free to play games.

The old project, pictured below, was an alright start, but it has lots of problems. Lighting is one of them, as a lot of it is not properly gone over, with bloom being a primary problem with the scene.  It also lacks a lot of variation in the roughness and is moreso a scene that demonstrated quantity over quality. The composition could also be improved, so I will be dedicating time to fixing many of the assets whose topology was too high to begin with.

Below is the Original Project Screenshots, this will be the project I am improving and essentially redoing




Originally when working on this project, I had created a mood board of some of the assets. What I've learned since then is while having one for a general direction is good, keeping as many reference images on hand as possible is critical to the success of creating a more realistic piece. Many of these assets can be pushed much further, and that is this scene's biggest fault is that there's too much going on in it, and needs some more direction to help guide it. Below is the original Moodboard used for the version of the project pictured above.


Before I even begin looking for new references, I have many models that I felt could use improvements. Many of them have a lot of unneeded polygons and have edges that disrupt the flow of the models. Focusing on primarily these models first, I would like to first see how many polygons I can cut away, primarily on the game machines. Below is the model sheet with examples of most of the assets from the previous iteration of this project. 

Now that I've given some background on the piece and some things I want to improve upon it, I've already begun work on remodeling some of the assets and doing a blockout of the scene in Unreal Engine. I'll be making textures in Substance Painter and Substance Designer, instead of in Photoshop where I first textured this scene.

I'll post next week with a detailed breakdown of the work I have done on the scene so far and progress i've made.