Creating The Blue City Of Chefchaouen In Unity

Chefchaouen is a technical demo created by two artists of Infinity Vector, Harley Gresham and Othman Sahbi. It was created in under two months as a proof-of-concept for Infinity Vector’s custom global illumination system for the legacy built-in render pipeline designed to run at 60 FPS on mobile devices.

Scroll down for a breakdown of the scene’s assets and its process.

Main Project Renders

Material Renders

Prop Renders

Why Chefchaouen?

We had several candidates for the project and decided on Chefchaouen because of its unique setting, its potential for showcasing our custom global illumination system, and the technical challenge it posed. Additionally, the setting was very different from the company’s main project we were working on at the time. Also, it encouraged us to create custom shaders to represent the organic feel of the locale’s architecture.

The Project

Goals

• Most importantly, to create an environment to showcase the custom global illumination system created by our CEO, Julien Mairat for use with the built-in pipeline for mobile devices.
• To better understand shaders by the creation of custom Amplify shaders for vertex painting, parallax occlusion, and more.
• To improve our process to complete a high quality environment in a limited time.

Restrictions

• Built-in render pipeline using Unity 2021 LTS
• Must run at a high frame rate on mid-range mobile devices.
• Must be completed within 2 months while also working on the main project of the company.

Members

For this project, the work was split between two artists; Harley Gresham and Othman Sahbi.

• Othman created the props, materials, shaders, and houdini tools.
• Harley made the blockout, shaders, placed props, and final geometry.

References

As is typical for the art team, we started with collecting references and thinking about potential props and materials. So, we ended up restricting ourselves to a limited number of unique props and materials to keep the project manageable whilst still capturing the essence of the blue city.

Work-in-Progress Shots

Shaders

One shader of note was the wall paint shader required to capture the handpainted look of the walls and floors of much of Chefchaouen. This was accomplished by blending between three different coloured paints using a packed mask built in Substance Designer to mimic the look of hand painting. Each channel is used in conjunction with vertex painting to allow artists to blend between the different blues and whites of the city naturally. This was a really interesting shader to make.

Mask in Designer

Shader setup in Amplify Shader

Wrapping Up

Working on Chefchaouen was a great experience for the two of us and we know we will put to use the techniques and processes we learned in future Infinity Vector projects.