My Stylized Environments Arts from 2023/2024

The Fishing Hut

Through this project, I wanted to imrove my skills into the pure hand painted style from the concept art of Polina Farukshina  ( no sculpting and baking at all). And I was curious about this specific workflow. How could i create all the information about the behaviour of the light ? how could I paint the different materials of wood, metal, and water with only the albedo map ? And how much do I have to stick to the initial concept ? Thoses are the general questions i asked to myself at the beginning.

Analyse

My analyse of the concept art helped to identify all the materials required, how to render them, how to avoid the repetition of the meshes and how to anticipate the UVmapping (2k textures), and prepare the hand-painted texturing. I had to negociate some decisions later, discovering and learning from mistakes.

Blocking

In order to get as close as possible to the concept and respect it proportions and the perspective, I learnt to used the  "fSpy" add-on with Blender to create my blockings.

UVmapping

But I also started to get confused with the texturing and the lighting : what kind of informations should i freeze on the meshes ? how  could use several times one meshe to save time and don't repeat myself in the process ?

I found some answers during the hand painting step by seperating local colors/lights and the global light of the scene.

Hand Painting

Once my UVmaps were ok, I worked with Substance Painter to colorize the meshes and added some helpers to prepare the Hand painting which has been made in Blender.

Tilling texture

For the tiling textures (here water and roof with 2k resolution), I learned to use the "offset" tool within photoshop.

Lighting

One omni directionnal light with a pale-orange color and some point light in pale-violet color composed the whole scene.

Conclusion

The Spring of the Forest

From the concept art of Madina Minvaleeva, I wanted to work with zBrush and Unreal.

In order to get all the maps for the materials, most of the elements had a sculpted high-poly and an optimized low-poly for the baking with substance painter.

With Unreal Engine, I wanted to learn how to create shaders for the water (falling water shader, waves shader), Running Virtual Texture for the grass and some particles effect to make the whole scene alive.

The witch coffee house

In order to improve my sculpting skills with zBrush through a stylised 3d style diorama, i thought the cute concept art from Jamilya Bukrina could be an opportunity to do that. And this is also the first time that i worked so long (5 months) on a complete environment as a self-taught 3D artist.

Thanks to pureRef, i concentrated all the references that needed to anticipate my work

To create the blocks

To learn how to sculpting with zBrush

With zBrush, i learnt a lot ! The 57 differents highpolys helped me to be more confident with the brushes (i am addicted to the trimSmoothBorder and the Orb brushes) and to learn how and when to deal with the main functions : subdivide, zremesh, dynamesh and decimate. I also learnt how to use the mask, how to create polygroups and thanks to polypaints, how to create  IDmap.

To clean the lowpolys efficiently

UVmapping with Blender,  baking and painting with Substance Painter

Trimsheet

Some elements of the house could used the trimsheet method : ground floor balustrade and structural beams. I decided to sculpt those repeated informations which could be directly projected on lowpolys. And with the material editor within Unreal, i could change the color of them.

Finally...Unreal !

It was not planned at the beginning, but i decided to make this diorama more alive ! So I exported my work to Unreal, which is really jnot the best thing to do at this time of the project !

 With Unreal, I use the "Runtime Virtual Texture" function on a texture which already exists on a mesh. Thanks to it, i could control the way the twigs of grass are multiplied on the ground but also their colors are linked to it.