I’m starting a new personal environment project and I’ll be sharing weekly updates here as I move forward.
The project focuses on a balcony area of a police station, Every thin in a cyberpunk-inspired aesthetic. This environment is being designed as part of a shared visual universe together with @nymxnymxnymxnymx, who is working on a complementary environment, so both scenes are meant to connect narratively and stylistically.
During this first week, I’ve mainly been focused on:
Setting up the project and defining the overall mood
Creating the initial blocking of the scene to establish scale and composition
Gathering and organizing visual references for architecture, materials, and lighting
Starting to plan and prototype the main modular systems that will define the structure of the environment
The goal at this stage was to build a solid foundation before moving into more detailed modeling and material work in the coming weeks.
Thanks for checking it out, and I’ll be back next week with more progress!
Here’s this week’s update on the cyberpunk police station balcony environment.
This week I focused mainly on asset production and expanding the modular building system for the background skyline.
To create more variety and flexibility, I developed two different modular approaches:
Floor-based modular system: Each building is constructed floor by floor. I designed this system with a strong focus on how the silhouette and overall appearance shift depen
ding on the viewing angle, making the skyline feel more dynamic and less uniform from different perspectives.
Block-based modular system: Larger structural blocks that can be combined in multiple ways to quickly generate different building variations and break repetition in the skyline.
Both systems are designed to work together, giving me a good balance between control and procedural-like variation.
At this stage, the modeling and UVs are fully completed for the background buildings — they’re now ready for texturing.
I also added more assets to the sofa area on the balcony to enrich the foreground storytelling. These assets are modeled and unwrapped as well, and currently waiting for the texturing pass.
Next step will be moving into materials and starting to bring everything to life visually.
This week I focused on UV work and texturing for all the assets I modeled last week. Most of the assets are now textured, although I’m currently dealing with some normal issues that I suspect are material-related, so I’ll be troubleshooting that next.
I also revisited the helipad area from a design perspective. Originally, it was built to support a single vehicle, which didn’t feel believable for a police station of this scale. Because of that, I redesigned the space and introduced an access entrance that connects the interior with a drone deployment area, since drones are a recurring element across the scene.
In addition, I started planning the train tracks, which will help frame the environment and reinforce the world building.
On the production side, I also began modeling the entire window facade area, which will play an important role in the composition and lighting of the balcony.
Next week I’ll continue polishing materials, solving the normal issues, and pushing forward the larger structural elements.
This week I continued pushing forward with the structural modeling of the environment, focusing mainly on the walls and floor area.
I started with the main door and the large window facade, which is one of the key assets of the environment. Through this window, players will be able to see the entire drone storage area inside the building. It also features a mechanical system designed to seal and reinforce the glass panels in case of emergency, adding a functional and narrative layer to the design. The asset is fully modeled and UV’d.
I also modeled and unwrapped almost the entire walkable floor area, covering the space from the window section all the way to the drone take-off zone. Additionally, I introduced a glass floor section in an area that isn’t meant to be accessible to the player, helping to add visual interest and break material repetition.
To address a large empty wall space near the entrance, I designed and modeled a speaker and light system. Beyond filling the composition, this element serves a narrative purpose: it acts as an alarm system that would activate in case of an emergency within the police station.
On top of that, I’ve also started modeling the drone exit tunnel, which will define the transition between the interior storage area and the exterior flight space. This element will be important both visually and structurally, as it reinforces the logic behind how drones operate within the building.
Overall, this week was heavily focused on structural elements and reinforcing both functionality and storytelling through design.
Very cool… it’s really shaping up. Is this for rendering or in-game realtime? If realtime this is a great project to see how far you can push trim-sheets.
The environment is mainly being developed with the goal of producing high quality renders, but my intention is to keep everything playable so the scene can also work in real time.
This week I continued developing the environment by focusing on adding detail and progressing with the texturing work across several areas of the scene.
I spent a good amount of time working on the pipe area, adding extra modeling detail, creating UVs, and preparing the assets for texturing. At the moment, 3 out of the 6 pipe assets are already UV’d and textured, with the remaining ones still in progress.
I also made a design change to the landing area. Instead of the previous setup, the space will now include a helipad where the drones land before moving toward the tunnel I modeled last week. This adjustment helps the sequence feel more logical, establishing a clearer flow from landing, to processing, and then into the drone tunnel.
In addition, I completed the texturing of the large window asset that I modeled last week, continuing to bring more of the scene closer to its final look.
Next week I’ll continue finishing the remaining assets and pushing further into texturing and scene polish.
This week I focused on refining key areas of the environment and improving some of the underlying systems.
I reworked the helipad area, adjusting both its design and layout to better fit the overall logic of the scene and improve how it connects with the drone workflow.
I also replaced the previous drone exit tunnel with a spline-based system for optimization purposes, allowing for a more efficient setup while still keeping flexibility when shaping the path.
On the technical side, I created a material to control the emissive intensity of the background buildings, allowing me to adjust it based on their position in the XYZ axes as well as the window pattern. This helps create more variation and depth in the skyline without needing unique textures for each building.
Additionally, I updated the floor in the rest area, improving its design, and I completed the UVs and texturing of the main door asset.
Finally, I also started animating cameras to test cinematic shots, beginning to explore how the environment will be presented visually.
Overall, this week was a mix of design iteration and technical improvements to make the environment more flexible and visually cohesive.
This week I’ve been progressing on several things at the same time.
One of the main focuses was refining the emissive material for the background buildings, as it wasn’t behaving exactly the way I wanted. I was having trouble balancing the intensity of the gradients in relation to the window mask, which made the overall emissive feel inconsistent.
To solve this, I adjusted the material so I could reintroduce the gradient value at the end of the process using a Multiply node, combined with a parameter that allows me to control the intensity more precisely. This gave me much better control over how the gradients and the window mask interact, making the skyline lighting feel more cohesive and art-directable.
Additionally, thanks to my friend Nima, who showed me this workflow, I started working with layered materials. Implementing this pipeline allowed me to significantly increase the texel density across my assets without sacrificing performance. It also gives me much more flexibility when iterating on surface variation and material blending.
I also added a backpack asset created by my friend Ana, who is currently working on her own cyberpunk character project. The idea behind including it in the scene is to eventually introduce her character into this environment, helping to connect both projects within the same universe.
Finally, I’ve been tweaking the lighting and animating cameras. At the moment, I’m not fully satisfied with the result yet, but I feel like it’s starting to move in a direction I really like. Hopefully, I’ll have something solid to show very soon.
