3D Environment works

Hello and welcome to my entry for The Rookie Awards 2023! I'm Gustav, a 28 year old guy with a great passion for 3D art. I'm excited to share two of my recent projects. If you're curios for more, don't hesitate to visit my artstation! With all that said, let me introduce you to the first work!    

Streets of Frosinone 

Based on paintings by Jacques Francois Carabain (Belgian, 1834-1933). His style is romantic realism, which I think shows in the vibrant colors and idyllic cityscapes he paints. Working on this was a joy, while it was still dark and cold outside here in Sweden. I'm happy to share the final result with both screenshots and breakdowns!      

Some alternative moods coming up...

Breakdown 

It's always a hard thing to plan out a project of this size. I started with estimating the overall time and tried to make a schedule from that. In the end, I required some more time, and the project was finished within 150 hours compared to the 120 hours I started out with. The first week was mostly reference gathering and breaking down the paintings to see what kind of assets and materials I would need to make. Carabain painted a lot of cityscapes so I grabbed those I liked and analyzed them to find repeating features. My original idea was to stick close to one of them, called "Figures in the Streets of Frosinone", but some weeks into the project it seamed like a scene of more complexity than I could handle in the limited time I had. Therefore, I looked on his other paintings to find a narrower environment, which inspired the finished result you saw above!   

Next up was blockouts followed by modules and tiling materials. I'm really into Substance Designer when it comes to create tiling materials. For this scene I made seven materials in Designer and one in ZBrush. Here's how they look (minus a sand material that I didn't render out):                     

The idea was to vertex paint the walls with four layers (brushed plaster, rough plaster, grout and either brick wall or stone wall). Even though I use some of this in the scene, I struggled a lot to make it look realistic, especially because it was hard to give volume to the transitions, giving it a flat look. My solution for this was to make decals. I sculpted a crack in the wall from reference in ZBrush and then baked it and textured it in Substance Painter using the tiling materials I created in Designer. I was much more convinced with the look!        

And here's the modules I designed for the scene:

For the foliage I tried out an idea I had to speed things up. Instead of modeling a leaf, I used ZBrushs see-through feature to mask out the shape of the leaf from reference. To separate the mask I used extract with a 0.01 thickness. Then it was quite easy to sculpt some details. I did two leafs this way and then assembled some different groups and baked them to planes. This made them very cheap, but at the cost of feeling a bit flat. The next time I think it's a good idea to give every leaf some geometry for better shadows and form. Later I also added branches. I made those by painting the silhouette in Photoshop with a soft brush, and importing this texture to Painter and converted it to height to give the illusion of form.              

I made both stone kits and this wooden kit. They're used in modules or placed in the world or to build assets like the table. 

Finally I made some props to give more life to the scene. For the baskets and bottles I created a trimsheet in Maya and textured it in Painter. 

That's it for the Streets of Frosinone! Thank you for checking it out!  

British Detective

Let's move inside and have a look at my second project. This time it's a Sherlock Holmes inspired interior. This one also took me around 150 hours to complete. I struggled with this one and went through periods when I didn't enjoyed working on it, but I'm pleased with the final result at last!         

Breakdown

The process of this were quite straight forward, even though it was a struggle at times. Since I didn't have a concept I faced some problems with composition and with deciding the final view. It started out as an smaller diorama and was later expanded with modules.  

The chair was a challenge I wanted to take on and learned some great techniques for chesterfield modeling from artem gogolov on youtube. Check out this video if you're curios how he does it. After modeling the pattern in Maya I used deformers to bend it in shape and then took it into ZBrush to add wrinkles to other parts of the chair.  

I made this metal trimsheet in Maya and textured it in Painter. The tea set also uses a trimsheet. The herringbone floor was made in Substance Designer.  

Wall modules and all assets created for the scene.

The painting of the tree is actually an older work I did that I included. Painted with Procreate. 

And that's it! Thank you so much for checking out my works! Feel free to check out my artstation and send me a question or a comment if you like. See you and good luck with your projects!