Adding more meshes, and modular building fun

In this post I will be talking about a modular building workflow I have recently been using for the kitchen area.

Firstly, here's the current scene. I've added some interesting new meshes to serve as focal points, such as the laptop in the center of the room and the cardboard boxes, as well as new furnishings.

The kitchen's units were a happy accident: initially, I was going to model the drawers, smaller shelves etc individually, but when I learned that I could modify my existing cupboard model to make new furnishings I decided that that was a more time-effective and ultimately more useful approach. 

And thus this:

Could become all this:

The advantages to modular building in this fashion are as follows:

• More resource-effective to reuse the same texture for a different model
• A lot quicker to implement than making new textures from scratch
• Easy to keep consistency across assets

Whereas the disadvantages are:

• Repeating textures may look jarring to a player, especially if it has unique elements
• Transforming objects with UV coordinates from another asset(the drawers for example) can cause texel rate issues
• Using existing texture sheets may bottleneck a modeller, for example if an asset needed an extra chrome finish and the given texture was completely made of wood

However, overall I deemed it a useful way to complete all the kitchen's units quickly. The unit itself could have a better texture(need to improve with spec highlights, and the chrome handle is too matte), but I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out.

As for the environment, I've recently been playing around with the Cascade particle editor, as for my apartment to be a bona fide drug den, a lot of smoke needs to be involved. It's definitely WIP, but I'm having fun with it anyway. I need to dive into the Bathhouse to find out how Jordan Walker created his effects for reference and research.

Thanks for reading :)