Cuban Market
Unreal Engine, Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Houdini, Rizom UV. 2025.
My final project on the MA Game Art course at Escape Studios took 14 weeks to complete. It is inspired by the open markets in Havana, Cuba, successfully targeting 30 fps on a Macbook Pro. The cinematic was initially rendered with OCIO colour conversion. The final deliverable was colour graded in Unreal Engine with a LUT made in Davinci Resolve.
From a creative standpoint, I wanted to explore the rich colour and material palette of Havana in the very early hours of the morning. In my early research, I looked into film noir to guide the art direction and cinematography, and Stray (2022), Uncharted 4 (2016), God of War Ragnarök (2022) for the level design.
One of the project's technical objectives was the development of a shader, enabling dynamic texture iteration for greater creative flexibility and to avoid repetition on large surfaces. The material uses Custom Primitive Data - a highly optimised workflow resulting in reduced drawcalls by minimising the number of Material Instances. Key inspiration to explore this approach was Evan Liaw and Amy Payne's work on Concord.
Custom nodes with HLSL were used as Substance Designer’s Histogram Scan and to drive different roughness values of small props based on their position in the world.
The shader uses packed tileable and trim noise textures and Mesh Painting, and blended Normal mesh maps for sculpted detail of facade elements and columns without compromising visual fidelity. A puddle function was added to the Mesh Paint's Alpha channel for the ground.
The project was also a good exercise on texturing most meshes via trim sheets while maintaining texel density, creating mesh decals, and achieving a night lighting setup optimised through emissive cards to fill shadows and lift black values.
Dirt packed alphas were created for trimsheets and similarly toggled via Custom Primitive Data parameters. Six base materials were created in Substance Designer - paint, stucco, brick, concrete, asphalt, wood - with details added in Substance Painter for trimsheets.
A few trim and facade elements, and columns were sculpted in Zbrush. The baked Normal mesh maps of these assets are blended in the Master Mesh Paint shader to minimise the amount of textures loaded in the level.
Mesh edge and recessed decals were sculpted and added to the wall panels and bases of columns. In retrospect, a simpler version of the Mesh Paint shader would have been used for these to further optimise the level's Shader Complexity.
Photogrammetry was used for small props - vegetables and fruit. Shooting outside on a sunny day in a shaded area produced the best results - shots taken of the object on a turntable required additional Control Points to be assigned.
Plastic bags, laundry and tarp were simulated in Marvellous Designer and textured with tileable textures and dirt CPD masks.
Procedural assembly from OSM data in Houdini was tested early on. However, no control over the resizing of each building footprint could be established, among others, for greater creative flexibility. Unreal Engine's PCG system was also tested. Considering the tight timeframe to develop these tools, the level was eventually assembled by hand.
Blueprints were used to place certain cables and floor panels.
Had additional time been available, buildings visible in the distance would have been composited to add depth and to allow for wider aerial shots.