3D modeling this scene was going to be tricky: it was well-known by a lot of Argentinians, who were going to be the target audience of this project, so the attention to detail had to be intricate. It was also an open space that presented a challenge for optimization techniques such as Occlusion Culling; I had to put extra attention to draw call batching and LOD models.
I modeled the entire base scene in 3ds Max and textured it using a combination of photographs I took, photographs from the internet, and tileable textures. I used reference imaging from Google Maps to fill in the blanks and get the appropriate proportions and layout of the plaza; however, the whole thing had to be modeled from scratch in a low-poly fashion to maintain performance.
As a final touch, I created additional military, pandemic, and other zombie/warzone props to place them in the scene and add the final touches to the “apocalyptic” setting of the game; an overhead helicopter flies by, ambulances race around in the surrounding streets, and a couple of humvees, military tents, equipment, and even body bags are laid around the whole scene.