Tokio's Room

Long time, no post 👋

Been a few weird years but we still do some 3D over here

This is a scene inspired by the 1999 game called ‘The Silver Case’, a visual novel wherein the player takes control of two characters tasked with investigating the return of an infamous serial killer. This level is the apartment the protagonist named Tokio.

I ended up making this to get better acquainted with UE5 and its visual bells and whistles (and headaches). It’s a pretty traditional game res scene with some standard optimizations and targeted choices to tell a bit of a story. It's also a much cleaner scene than I normally do and was surprisingly challenging to hold off adding more grime and clutter. I instead concentrated on adding that noise where it mattered to keep a good global balance of noise to areas of rest.

I picked this project because it gave me a loose blueprint with lots of room for interpretation. Everything here is made by me with the exception of some alpha cards and color textures used for the skybox buildings outside the apartment. All world textures (tileables and trims) are made in Substance Designer and all props are baked in Painter (or bashed together with trims). Most textures are 2K or below. I use one 4K map for the clutter: PC, ashtray, newspapers, boxes, ramen cup, paper stacks, and other assets.

Biggest challenge here was redoing the scale and creating a bunch of relevant details using low res PS1 textures as the key ref. I had to invent a lot and pull in ideas from a lot of real world ref. I also ended up rescaling the room to make it cozier/tighter to emphasize the cluttering. One of the largest changes was having to do a more fleshed out kitchen where there was previously only a simple textured box.

Took about a month working on this 3-5 days a week.

If you’re still reading this for some reason, thanks and say hello! 🙂