Another hobby scene transformed into a video game level: The Technical School 32 “San Martin”, a high school located in the Chacarita district of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The map actually goes back to the Shattered Ops, but after a serious set of graphics fidelity upgrades, I was able to get it to look nearly photorealistic with a lot of eyeballing and tweaking.
The above images showcase my first try at trying to make the school into a virtual model, and the comparison remaster. Both of them were done by me, the original Shattered Ops one was done in 2015, while I did the complete remaster in 2016. The new map was so good, that when I showed a colleague the images, he thought the top ones were the 3D game, and the bottom ones were photographs.
I 3d-modeled the map in 3ds Max completely from scratch; I didn’t have access to the floor plans, so I had to carefully eyeball the proportions of the entire structure. In the remastered version, I took much more time looking at the different details and replicating them in the 3D model. The vast majority of the textures were done using photograph references (I took over 800 photographs of different parts of the school to create the model).
Since the model was in an interior setting, optimization was easy due to Occlusion Culling, but I also made use of static global illumination, low-poly models, and LODs. The end result was superbly impressive (at a time when Unity’s graphics were still considered to be quite inferior to Unreal Engine’s, a loot of people thought I had developed the scene in Unreal).
