Blossom Shanghai

This is a semester-long group project on recreating a street in Shanghai called Yellow River Road, which used to be the most popular food street back in the 90s. It started with a Chinese television show, “Blossom Shanghai,” which tells the street’s past glory. Thus, we want to recreate the street to express a sense of nostalgia. Since our group does not have character artists, we try to express this feeling just through the environment.

I am responsible for creating procedural materials using Substance Designer and procedural buildings in the background using Houdini. I am really glad everything is put together, and I have special thanks to my amazing teammates Lisa, Iris, Airan, and Kimi. It is impossible to create such a large and detailed scene without their effort. It gave me insights on making environment art and taught me tricks to make high-quality scenes efficiently.

Breakdown

Procedural building

The background buildings are procedurally generated with varied facades. I am mainly inspired from this building at Yellow River Road. It has many features that represent a typical old apartment in China: brick wall, colorful curtains, extended clothes hanging rod, and exposed AC units. The chaotic layout breaks the gridded structure of the apartment.

The procedural building tool from Project Titan gave me a good startup for generating buildings. However, it only generates buildings from different modular walls, with each modular piece created manually. To showcase the chaotic layout of elements on each wall, I took a step further to generate elements such like pipes, hanging rods, AC units, and awnings onto each wall using Houdini.

I also noticed windows in the reference building are pretty similar, which meant they can also be procedurally created. Therefore, I also procedurally modelled the window in Houdini with tweakable parameters to control its shape. By now, the building can be fully procedurally generated.

After putting everything together, I am able to generate various buildings easily from an input mass. Unfortunately, the input models are not optimized enough so scattering a lot of elements cause large load time. This is definitely an area of improvement.

It also supports simple curved geometry mass. To get the reference building, I first generated a base version from a 90 degree pie input mass, then added some manual touchups such as balconies and rims.

Procedural material

In addition, I also created a few procedural materials using Substance Designer for assets such as walls and floors.

Substance Designer graph of concrete

Substance Designer Graph of tile floor