Creating Hand-Painted-Style Scene with Colored Succulents Using Blender

Introduction

I am Zehra Khan, a Lead Environment Artist based in Canada. I have worked at Emerald City Games on stylized games for almost five years and am now working at Fortis Games. Before I got into the gaming industry, I worked as an architect. I always loved the 3D aspect of architecture and wanted to create more fantasy-based environments. Playing games growing up, I was always inspired by the environments and character art and was always curious about how to get into that industry.

Getting Started

After creating my Hidden Elven Valley project, I knew I wanted to make another smaller-scaled environment this time. In the previous project, I focused a lot on the composition and the lighting. In this scene, it was more about the sculpts and the details. This time, I was inspired by the beautiful concept of Gxy Gao Xuyang. They used beautiful pastel colors in the concept, and I wanted to push that into 3D.

Composition & Blockout

It was easy to recreate the building itself, as I followed what the artist had in mind. I started by adding the grey block and slowly introducing the details. Each piece was sculpted separately and meticulously, as I wanted to do a lot of zoom-in shots. It was important that the building looked good from far as well as up close.

Modeling

All the 3D models were created using Blender. I started with the main building blocks and slowly worked towards the smaller details. It was tempting to start with the cactus and succulents, but I wanted to get the base building done first. 

After I had all the mid-poly for the 3D done, I needed to put them in the engine even though they would all be eventually replaced by low-poly game meshes. It was important to see the scale of the props in the engine. I made sure everything was proportionate but also slightly more stylized (so plants were made a bit larger). The windows on top of the ceiling and the roof tiles were all modular, with slight variants in the texturing and sculpting to save time.

I sculpted the main blocks of the building in separate pieces. For most of the sculpting, I used the Planar brush and the Trim Dynamic brush with a square alpha. The rest of the details were added in Substance 3D Painter. Modeling for the succulents was mainly done in Blender using many tools for duplication, such as the Array tool. I did not take the succulents to ZBrush as it was not needed to add a sculpting pass to them.

I made one petal of a succulent and then tweaked it to make variations of different types of succulents. I spent some time studying these plants, their various types, and their natural arrangements. Because I wanted these to be viewed up close, I made them to be of higher fidelity.

Reference:

After making the succulents and cacti in 3D, the mid-poly was brought into the engine to check the scale and shapes. I always immediately test out the assets I make in the engine before fully committing to them. This essential step helps me make any changes if needed, and most definitely, I need to go back and make changes. In this case, I had to reduce the detail on the succulents so they did not look too distracting, and at the same time, I had to make sure they were detailed enough so they looked good in a close-up shot. Composition was also important as it was tempting to add additional colors to the succulents. I stuck with just three colors: green, purple, and turquoise, as was how the concept artist had envisioned it. I added subsurface and slight emissive to the tips of the succulent so they would catch the sunrays passing through.

Texturing

One of the highlights I wanted for this project was texturing. I was inspired by a lot of hand-painting texturing, especially in Arcane and Wayfinder. However, I also wanted to automate this process a bit. I made a mask in Substance 3D Designer where instead of taking the edges from Curvature Map, I used color from the World Space Map and distorted it with some noise and utilized a Color To Mask filter to pick some of the faces that face different directions in World Space Normal. These areas were then further beveled and passed through a histogram scan that further distorted the area masked.

This 'distortion' resulted in a peeling paint effect, which I then created as a mask generator and imported into Substance 3D Designer. The mask made the texture painting come together and sped up the process of creating a hand-painted look. I also spent a considerable amount of time manually painting some details, as handcrafted techniques still look more unique and intentional than random ones.

Even after the filter is placed, there is a lot of manual tweaking involved, and damage where the edges are highlighted the most. Damages in areas that are normally shielded by shade are where I intentionally didn't add a lot of wear and tear.

Painting the white areas of the wall was the most challenging. They are white/beige in the concept, but I wanted to add a few extra splashes of color to really tie the whole art work together. Also, it needed to work well in the engine. Therefore, what I saw in Substance 3D, was not the true representation of how the art asset would turn out to be.

The walls and windows had different tones of color as well as one unifying base color that unified the entire block. Apart from the splashes of paint and highlights to the edges, an overall gradient was also applied where the color would darken as it neared the ground.

Assembling the Final Scene

The final scene was constantly updated in Unreal Engine. The main challenge I had was that the concept did not have any surrounding elements added in, and it was up to me to create the background. After exploring several options, I decided on a deep blue sky and white sand to contrast the white building. It was a tough choice as I also leaned heavily on the lighter blue sky and yellow sand. I did want the scene to feel alive and the light blue sky made the overall scene feel a bit washed out.

The rest of the composition of the props and the plants was already dictated by the concept quite well, and I followed that through.

Lighting, Rendering, & Post-Production

I changed the color of the sky to a deeper blue. This impacted how my materials were read so it was important to set this up early. I then did some paint-overs of the scene in Photoshop to add where the clouds would be. I painted the clouds in the alpha channel and then added that texture onto a card that I animated in the final sequence.

Initially, I tried many different lighting setups, sunset being one of them. However, none of them did justice to the scene as much as a simple directional light highlighting the face of the building while the right side sits in shadow.

The other thing I added was a plane with moving sand-like particles to imitate moving sand. For this, I followed this YouTube tutorial:

I made it so it would be a horizontal plane and tried different settings.

The last step was to animate all the windows! I made a level sequence where I added the windows as an actor that I could rotate. Animating them was easy as all I had to do was rotate them along their axis. When making these props, I had to make sure that they had the pivots placed at the right locations, so it was easy to move them like an actual window/door.

Conclusion

The biggest challenge was the color palette at the end, where I had to fill in the space of the imaginary sky and sand. I ended up choosing what I felt was the most in line with what the concept artist had in mind but with some touch of my own.

Another challenge was making the succulents pop into the scene. I added a sub-surface on the tips of the succulents so they would also read brighter. Since everything was sculpted with a lot of detail, I had to check the props in the engine continuously to make sure they looked good close up.

The main focus was to create detailed props that would show attention to detail, while at the same time, creating a lively and cosy mood. Hopefully you folks like what I ended up with!

Zehra Khan, Lead Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine