One of the missions of the Unidad Moribunda game I was developing featured a subway station in CABA (Line B). The station was very intricate in the way it showcased beautiful murals, had detailed signage, and had intricate indirect lighting; but as usual, I was up for the challenge.
I started by gathering ample reference material: I first went to the subway station and took over 100 photographs of the different places from different angles. I made sure to pay special attention to the hand-painted murals as I would later try to replicate these by hand in Substance Painter; there were too many objects on the way for it to be accurately projected.
I 3D-modeled the entire subway station structure and then did a set of props separately, and finally focused on the subway train stations. I did all of these within 3ds Max.
I paid special attention to the proportions of the walls and ceiling: I used a combination of photograph texturing (walls, painting, ceiling, floor, rails) which was taken and then adjusted in photoshop, together with algorithmic texturing (subway, props, ticket machines, booths, etc).
Since the scene was decently low-poly and closed-ended, it made sense to pay a lot of attention to the lighting and details. I used a combination of LOD-based high details models, occlusion culling, lightmaps, reflection probes with box-projection, and image effects to strike a balance between visual fidelity and performance.
To optimize the darkness of the subway tunnels, instead of adding additional geometry or texturing, I just colored the sky black in this scene.
