River Town - Stylized Enviroment

Here I am after a while to share with you the latest update and the final look.

During the last months I worked on the texture, the foliage, and the vfx parts.

For the texture, I used the game “Genshin Impact” as my main reference. What I wanted to achieve was that cartoon-colorful feeling that the game gave to me.

Some of the textures were created firstly with Substance Designer and then adjusted and incorporated for the final look with Substance Painter.

For other textures, I followed “The 3D Artist's Coloring Book” by Stylized Station which gave me a good understanding of how stylized texture works.

The only thing I couldn’t do by myself with a good result was the water. Shoutout to the amazing Fabián López (@carepas_design on Twitter) who shared this beautiful material.

When the textures were done I started to create the foliage. I tried different techniques and in the end, I achieved the result I was trying to aim… fluffy leaves for a cute environment.

The last part was adding a few vfx to complete the final look. Like the previous parts, this was my first approach to the Niagara System. For a more natural look, I added the movement of the leaves with the wind, the dust movement, the smoke from the chimneys, and some other small details.

Even if the result is not perfect I’m happy with it.

Thank you for reading my breakdown so far, I hope you like it.

I’m a big fan of stylized art, and most of my favorite games are in this style, so for the second environment I chose a piece of art made by the concept artist Kemineko (on Twitter). It was a hard choice because every artwork of his is amazing and unique.

Link for Kemineko’s concept art on his Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/kemineko/status/1371038380541190144?s=20

Because this is my second environment project made with Unreal Engine 5, I’m developing a personal workflow:

- firstly I do a big research for structural reference - mostly for modeling purpose -, creating a big moodboard with PureRef;

- then I create a rough blockout on UE5 to get an idea of ​​the space and dimensions that would respect the main reference;

- after the first blockout I proceed to do another one in Maya with more details of the buildings - to help me with the proportions I like to use a default mannequin of the software -;

- when the “Maya blockout” is done I moved the fbx file to Unreal to see what i could looks like and start to fix the camera view - most of the time this took me a while to find the “perfect angle” -;

- once the blockout phase is done, I start modeling the single buildings on Maya, then I create the UV and test it on Unreal Engine 5 to see the result.

At the moment I finished the modeling part and I’m starting the texturing one. I think that the workflow will be similar to the modeling one for the reference’s research. After that I think I will use mostly Substance Painter for the principal buildings and Substance Designer for the tileable wall and floor.

Also below here I share some other old screenshots of the process - like searching the right angle for the camera view or trying to see if some tileable texture would work on the bridge etc.

Thank you for your attention and let me know what you think in the comments below!

To continue…