Creating Eerie Payphone Scene Inspired by Silent Hill & Resident Evil

Introduction 

Hello! My name is Gabriel Bossenberry. I am a 3D Environment Artist studying at the Think Tank Training Centre. “The Last Call” is my project for the Intermediate term final. 

Last Call

Deciding on what to do for a project has always been something I spend a lot of time contemplating. I have always been a fan of the Silent Hill and Resident Evil franchises, so I wanted to take a shot at creating an eerie scene that had some grunge to it. The other idea I liked was having a payphone as a centerpiece. The concept of what I wanted was pretty niche, so I threw together a quick photobash of it in Photoshop. This served as my general vision that I would expand upon as I moved through the project. 

I gathered most of my references from Google Images and Flickr and put them into a PurRef board. For the payphone itself, I wanted to find one to take my own photos of. This was immensely helpful. Having a high-quality reference for each angle of a payphone allowed me to capture the personality accurately.

Modeling

When modeling the payphone, I challenged myself to keep a low poly count. I primarily used extrusions, beveling, and the knife tool for my modeling. Since I was keeping a lower poly count, all of the finer details I’d save for the textures. The biggest challenge for me when modeling this was deciding on where to sacrifice the poly count and optimizing it down to around 7K triangles.

I ran into a lot of issues with shading and normals, but to fix this, I imported the model into Blender and used the Weighted Normals modifier. From my understanding, Maya also has a similar tool, but I found that using Blender was more effective. 

When creating assets, I first try to make quick-scale, accurate proxy models. This is not only great for getting a quick feel for the scene's composition, but also helps me know the objects are proportional to each other before spending so much time modeling.

Retopology

All of my retopology was done using the Target Weld and Knife tools. I chose to skip making a high poly since I was on a time crunch, and my model was hard surface, mainly. When doing the UVs, I always start with an auto unwrap to get separate UV islands, and then manually sew back together parts of the mesh. I use normal-based unwrapping as well if it works for a specific area. 

The payphone is a fairly large asset, and I wanted to achieve a high level of detail in my texture work, so I opted to use multiple materials for the prop. The metal frame, glass, and payphone area are all their own set. I used the same textile density generally for each piece, but I scaled some up to use as much space as I could.

The glass has more textile density than the rest of the model. This is purely a creative decision I made so I could push the details on the textures more. All the other assets in my scene follow a similar workflow. Some are packed into a single UV set. For example, the coins and cash are one single material. 

Texturing

When creating textures, I used Substance 3D Designer for my modular pieces and Substance 3D Painter for everything else. This was the first time I've used Substance 3D Designer in a project aside from class assignments. I had some help creating my concrete sidewalk from a YouTube video by Braytonks3D, where he creates a concrete material.

For the walls, I created a simple plaster material with an alternate dirty version for vertex painting. These are fairly basic materials, but my use of decals helped bring a lot of detail and personality to them. Most of the decals I created for my scene started as an alpha in Photoshop. Then I’d take them into Substance 3D Painter and create a texture with them.

Texturing the payphone was one of the most rewarding parts of this project for me. Getting the blood right was very important not only to the payphone but also to the set dressing of the rest of the scene. To make sure the placement of the blood splatters was realistic, I watched a few forensic blood analysis videos on YouTube and gathered some references.

After this, I created a set of alphas using Photoshop and set up a 3-layer system in Substance 3D Painter. This method gave me control of how thick the blood was and the ability to fine-tune the color as it thickened. 

For the painted metal, I broke down the characteristics of what I saw in my reference photos. Then I recreated each layer by layer. I started with the color, then roughness, and lastly height. My painted metal gets most of its personality from the roughness and height, so I made sure to try my best to accurately portray them. Most of the other surfaces on the asset follow a similar workflow. 

Rendering

Since the start of the project, I had my camera shots blocked out in Unreal Engine. The early versions of my camera shots gave me a clear guide to assembling my final scene. It made it easy to decide where props would go and what spots needed the most attention. 

My goal was to tell a spooky story with my scene. This led me to experiment with slow, suspenseful shots that took the viewer through the crime scene. I wanted the scene to feel isolated, so I restricted myself to using a single flickering street lamp and the lights on the payphone itself.

I could have lowered the brightness of the street lamp even more, but I did not want to obscure all the other parts of the scene. I added color correction and simple sound effects to my render in post. I kept it fairly simple in post by just adding a greener hue to the scene and boosting my red value slightly. 

Conclusion 

In total, this project took me 4 weeks to create! I enjoyed creating the final render sequence the most and seeing the vision I had planned day one come to life. It was a blast to mess around with camera settings and effects like the light flickering.

During this project, I learned a ton about working inside Unreal Engine 5. It was my first time tackling a lot of different elements in Unreal, so I had to spend some time learning as I went. One of my biggest takeaways from this project was to be careful when it comes to planning and managing time well. I did not have much time for certain aspects of this project, and I ended up crunching pretty hard during the last week. This project was a big learning step in that regard. 

Thanks again to the team at 80 Level for giving me the opportunity to share more about one of my projects! Appreciate everyone who took the time to read about “Last Call”! 

Gabe Bossenberry, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford