Concept
So this was a project I did for my Applied Game Art Class at SCAD. We were supposed to model a modular structure, internal or external, in Maya and port each model to unreal with textures and lighting. Our professor suggested that we think about including a narrative as we design the space to help the final render be more compelling.
I chose to do a suicide scene inside a ramen shop because it literally just popped into my head and I liked the idea.
Interior and Furniture
To start off, I went online and started getting ideas for what the interior of a ramen shop would look like. I didn't want to go for your typical super busy and super enclosed ramen shop. I wanted to go with a more modern and americanized storefront.
After getting some inspiration for seating arrangements, I went into Maya and go to work on stools, benches, booths, and the main bar.
Decorative Assets
Next up I had to design a few decorative assets to keep the scene looking busy. I made a fatal mistake by choosing to have part of the kitchen visible from the dining area. I didn't initially consider just how many tools and cookware would normally be seen from the bar. Which is kind of silly since my part time job at the time was in a restaurant, go figure.
Anyway, I had to keep my decorative asset list to a minimum to keep within the scope of the project so I narrowed it down to a few different dish, cup, and sauce container designs. With these, I would be able to make the scene look like it had just had patrons inside before they we're all evacuated by the crime scene investigators.
Crime Scene
Eventually it came time to work on the crime scene itself. I wanted the victim to look like he was sitting at the bar and shot himself after he was finished his meal. I was going with the idea that he came to this shop to have his 'last meal' of sorts before he ended it.
To get the scene where I wanted it, I needed to make the gun, the body, and the blood. The first of which took me far longer than I'd like to admit to model. I became almost obsessed with modeling a modular gun correctly even though it was such a small part of this scene. I suppose I enjoyed the challenge of modeling my own weapon.
The 'body' was created by grabbing a skeletal mesh offline, posing it in to a position I thought appropriate, and then dropping an n-cloth on it.
The blood is a decal projection set to ignore the body cloth.
The crime scene tape is a simple plane modeled in Maya, but put together using splines in unreal. I used a YouTube tutorial to figure out how to get splines to work and then manipulated them to weave around the table supports.