Breakdown: How to Build a Scene Inspired by Traditional Mumbai Chawl

Introduction

My name is Uday Aklade, and I'm an Environment Artist. I recently completed my Master's degree in Games Art with distinction from the University of Staffordshire and am now looking forward to taking the next step in the game industry. I got into 3D art through my love for movies and visual storytelling.

I've always been drawn to worlds that feel alive, and over time, that interest naturally shifted toward game environments, where art, storytelling, and interactivity come together. My skills have grown through guidance from my lecturers, hands-on project work, and constant experimentation, often supported by online tutorials and free learning resources.

During my Master's degree, I worked on several personal projects as well as a collaborative game project that won Best Team of the Year 2025 at Game Republic. I also received the GRADEX First Prize in the Master's category and a Rank A certificate from The Rookies.

Alongside game art, I have around one year of professional experience in the VFX and advertising industry, and I completed a 1UP game art internship at the University of Staffordshire, which gave me valuable insight into professional production pipelines and collaborative workflows.

I enjoy building environments from the ground up and telling stories through detail, whether that's a small prop or an entire level. I'm motivated to keep learning, pushing my skills, and contributing to projects that create memorable, believable worlds.

Mumbai Chawl: The Forgotten Courtyard Project

Mumbai Chawl: The Forgotten Courtyard began as my Master's environment art project, to create a game-ready environment using workflows commonly found in AAA production. Before starting asset creation, I researched professional Environment Artist roles to define the project’s scope and identify the technical areas I wanted to improve, including modular asset creation, layered materials, and scene optimization.

The main inspiration came from the Mumbai level in the Hitman series, which stood out for its dense urban layout and strong atmospheric storytelling. I was particularly interested in how the environment balances heavy architectural repetition with enough material variation to keep the scene visually engaging. This directly influenced my decision to recreate a Mumbai chawl courtyard, a shared residential space that naturally combines repetition, density, and a strong lived-in character.

Beyond the game reference, the choice of a chawl was also personal. Having seen similar spaces in real life, I wanted the environment to feel authentic rather than stylized. Chawls are shaped less by unique architecture and more by layers of paint, wear, dirt, and everyday human activity, making them an ideal subject for exploring how to break repetition through materials rather than relying on unique assets.

To support this, I followed a structured reference workflow. I analyzed game references to understand layout and atmosphere, studied real-world chawl photographs to guide proportions, and gathered material references to observe paint aging, grime buildup, and surface wear. Rather than copying a single source, these references informed the overall logic, material behavior, and atmosphere of the environment.

Blockout & Scene Planning

The blockout phase was a crucial step in defining both the scale and flow of the environment. I began by breaking the chawl courtyard into modular architectural components, identifying key repeating elements such as walls, floors, corridors, staircases, doors, and windows.

This early breakdown helped establish a structure that could scale efficiently while still supporting visual variation later in the project. I created the initial blockout in Blender, assembling modular pieces to quickly test proportions, floor heights, corridor widths, and overall spatial readability. During this stage, I focused on maintaining a believable real-world scale while ensuring the environment felt dense but navigable.

The blockout was then brought into Unreal Engine 5 early on to evaluate camera angles, composition, and how the space reads at different scales, helping guide layout and asset-planning decisions. To further support planning, I introduced simplified placeholder assets for doors and windows during the blockout phase.

These were not final models, but they helped establish rhythm, repetition, and visual density across the courtyard. Resolving these structural elements early allowed me to move into asset creation and texturing with a clear understanding of how each piece would function within the final scene.

Layered Material Setup

Before delving deeper into asset production, I decided to focus on setting up my layered material system in Unreal Engine early on. Since this was an area I had limited experience with and knew it would take time to develop, I wanted to resolve it first so it could support the entire environment consistently.

Establishing this system early also helped guide later decisions related to asset modeling, UV layouts, and overall material usage. I chose a layered material workflow because it offered greater control and flexibility across the environment. Each material layer could be adjusted independently, allowing textures and parameters to be reused efficiently while maintaining consistent texel density throughout the scene.

This non-destructive approach made it possible to stack, mask, and blend materials in a scalable way, which was especially important given the size of the environment and the amount of repeating geometry. Variation within this system was handled using a combination of RGB masking and vertex painting. RGB masks were used to control how different material layers blended and to introduce color variation, dirt, and grime in specific areas.

Vertex painting was then used to fine-tune these blends directly in the engine, allowing for subtle and organic variation across surfaces without increasing texture count or relying on unique assets. Alongside the layered material system, I also explored a few additional material setups that provided quicker or more suitable solutions for specific assets.

These included a master material setup to manage shared parameters across assets, as well as vertex painting combined with Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) for selected surfaces. These setups were used selectively and designed to integrate visually with the main layered materials, ensuring the overall scene remained consistent without adding unnecessary complexity to the workflow.

Material Creation

Once the layered material system was established, I created the core materials used across the environment. Structural materials such as concrete and plaster for walls and ceilings were created in Substance 3D Designer, while an Indian stone tile material was developed for floors to maintain a distinct visual identity.

For doors, four primary materials: wood, paint, steel, and rust were created in Substance 3D Painter, allowing for faster iteration and direct control over wear and surface detail. These materials formed the foundation of the environment and were reused consistently across assets through the layered material system.

Structural Modeling & UV Strategy

The walls were intentionally kept geometrically simple, with most visual complexity driven by materials subdivisions were added only where required to support vertex painting and material blending. The walls were unwrapped using three UV sets, each serving a specific purpose. The first UV set was dedicated to RGB masking, driving paint color variation, and material blending.

The second UV set handled tileable textures, ensuring consistent texel density across the environment. The third UV set was used for combined masking across multiple assets, allowing effects such as Ambient Occlusion, corner dirt, and wear to appear naturally where walls interacted with elements like pillars.

During early testing, the sharp 90-degree wall edges felt too clean. To address this, edge damage floater meshes were created and placed along sharp corners and intersections. These floaters helped break up silhouettes and added chipped, worn detail without altering the base wall geometry, reinforcing the aged character of the environment.

Doors & Windows

Doors and windows required a different approach, as the environment relied on a small number of repeating modular pieces. To avoid visible repetition, I focused on creating a flexible system that could generate a wide range of visual outcomes without significantly increasing asset count.

I began by modeling three main door types as the foundation of the system, along with two additional security doors and windows designed to work as layered elements. This established a modular base that could later support variation without the need for unique assets.

Once the base models were finalized, I created high-poly versions in ZBrush, focusing on surface damage, edge wear, and subtle deformation to give the doors a more lived-in appearance. These details were then baked down to the low-poly meshes.

With the base assets in place, additional mesh variation was introduced by creating open and closed states of doors. The two security doors could then be combined with all three base doors, significantly increasing visual variation while keeping the overall asset count low.

Doors and windows followed a two-UV-set workflow. The first UV set was used for RGB masking and detail normals, while the second UV set handled tileable textures at the desired texel density, ensuring crisp surface detail across all variations.

Gallery Section Modeling & Variation

The gallery section was modeled using a similar approach to the doors and windows, with individual parts created first and then combined into a larger structure. This allowed for flexibility during assembly and supported efficient variation.

Because the gallery elements were initially modeled separately and later combined, a third UV set was introduced to handle corner dirt, wear, and ambient occlusion across merged parts. This ensured that aging effects appeared continuous across intersections rather than feeling disconnected between individual meshes.

To further break repetition, mesh-level variation was introduced by selectively deleting or removing parts of the gallery to create worn-out and broken versions. These damaged variations added another layer of visual interest while reinforcing the aged and neglected feel of the environment.

The stairs were created using the same workflow as the gallery section, sharing the same UV logic and variation strategy to maintain consistency across connected architectural elements.

Roof Assets & LOD Strategy

The roof assets followed a modeling approach similar to the gallery section but with a stronger focus on optimization. Since the roof covered large areas of the environment and was visible from multiple angles, multiple LOD levels were created.

By reducing geometric complexity across LODs while preserving the overall silhouette, the roof assets remained visually consistent at a distance without unnecessary rendering cost. This helped maintain performance across the scene while supporting the scale of the environment.

Texturing & Surface Variation

Texturing for the environment focused on breaking repetition while keeping the workflow efficient and scalable. Since most of the scene relied on repeating assets, variation was introduced through layered materials, RGB masks, and vertex painting rather than through unique textures.

To establish believable variation, I studied real-world references to understand how wall colors and paint conditions differ across chawl environments. Based on this research, I defined a controlled set of color variations that could be reused throughout the scene. These were driven through RGB masks within the layered material system, allowing different paint layers, exposed plaster, dirt, and wear to blend naturally.

For walls, RGB masks controlled large-scale color variation and surface aging, while vertex painting allowed dirt and wear to be placed more organically near the base of walls, around corners, and at intersections. In certain areas, vertex painting was combined with parallax occlusion mapping (POM) to enhance surface depth without increasing mesh complexity.

For doors, windows, and gallery assets, three RGB mask sets were created to represent clean, medium, and heavily worn conditions. These wear states were layered on top of existing mesh variations, meaning each asset combined geometry variation, color variation, and wear variation. This multi-layered approach significantly increased visual diversity and effectively solved repetition across the environment.

By combining reference-driven color planning, mesh variation, RGB masks, vertex painting, and layered materials, the environment maintained a cohesive visual language while ensuring that repeated assets felt unique and lived-in.

Modular Asset Workflow

The environment was assembled using a modular workflow, with the courtyard planned around reusable architectural elements from the early blockout stage. Core assets such as walls, doors, windows, gallery sections, stairs, and roof elements were designed to work together, allowing the entire scene to be constructed from a relatively small set of meshes.

Because variation was already built into the assets through mesh variations, RGB masks, and material parameters, these modular pieces could be reused multiple times across the scene without visible repetition. This approach made it easier to iterate on layout and maintain consistency while managing the complexity of a dense environment.

Props & Set Dressing

In the final stage of the project, I focused on prop asset creation, primarily following a mid-poly workflow instead of a traditional high-poly to low-poly pipeline. This approach allowed me to work efficiently while maintaining clean silhouettes and believable surface detail. All props were textured using a PBR workflow to ensure consistent material response within the environment.

Most supporting props were created with texture reuse and efficiency in mind. Multiple assets shared a single 0-1 UV space and texture set, which helped reduce the overall number of textures while keeping visual consistency across the scene. This workflow was applied to the majority of props, allowing them to integrate seamlessly with the environment's material and color language.

Props were then used during the set dressing phase to support scale, usage, and visual storytelling across the courtyard. By reusing, rotating, and repositioning these assets, it was possible to break up large architectural surfaces and reinforce the lived-in feel of the space without increasing asset complexity or distracting from the primary architectural elements.

Foliage: Plants

For foliage, I initially planned to use SpeedTree, but due to limited experience with the software, I chose a low-poly workflow using texture atlases. This approach allowed me to create plants efficiently while maintaining control over variations. For larger plants, I used a Megascans atlas and generated multiple variations from it.

Dried grass and small bushes were created using custom atlases compiled from online PNG images. These atlases were packed with an alpha channel in Photoshop to avoid using an additional alpha texture set in Unreal Engine, and Normal Maps were generated using Normal Map Online.

The foliage meshes were created by cutting geometry to match the atlas silhouettes, with UVs projected from a top view in Blender. The leaves and grass were then deformed using soft selection and duplicated to create denser variations where needed.

Decals played an important role in adding surface detail and storytelling throughout the environment. I created a wide range of decals, including garbage, pebbles, rangoli patterns, manholes, and other ground details. The decal workflow was kept straightforward: PNG images were downloaded, compiled when needed, packed with an alpha channel in Photoshop, and then converted into Normal Maps using an online tool when required.

These textures were imported into Unreal Engine and used within a decal material setup similar to the one used for edge damage. Not all decals relied on Normal Maps, depending on their purpose and visibility. Cloth decals followed the same workflow and were used selectively to add variation and visual interest to specific areas of the scene.

Scene Assembly & Composition

Scene assembly began after all structural modular pieces were finalized in terms of modeling and texturing. I started by assembling a small section of the gallery, combining different doors and windows to check dimensions and ensure the snapping functionality worked correctly. This process helped reveal issues with gallery repetition and mesh overlap, which were resolved at this stage to ensure the modular pieces could be assembled cleanly and reliably.

Since the scene was large and included multiple variations of walls and doors in terms of color, wear, and mesh states, it was important to follow a clear assembly strategy. One of the first steps was matching door colors with wall variations to achieve better visual harmony, which made large-scale placement more efficient later on.

The courtyard was then constructed using a base set of eight walls per side, expanded into multiple color-dominant wall sets to introduce variation while maintaining balance. Gallery sections were added next, with green galleries treated as the dominant and historically original color, while other wall colors suggested later repainting. Doors and wires were gradually introduced to reinforce the lived-in feel and layered history of the chawl.

Lighting & Mood

After assembling all assets and compiling the final scene, I moved on to lighting. I kept the setup relatively simple, with the main light source being a directional light. The goal was to achieve a warm overall tone that reflected the mood of a chawl environment. While the lighting in the Hitman chawl scene was a strong reference, it felt slightly too warm, so I aimed for a more balanced middle ground.

To refine the look, I adjusted parameters such as light intensity, indirect lighting contribution, and source angle to control the sharpness and softness of shadows. A skylight combined with an HDRI Map was used to introduce softer, more realistic shadowing and to ensure the scene remained evenly lit without harsh contrast.

By carefully balancing the directional light and skylight settings, I was able to achieve a subtle, warm lighting setup that supported the atmosphere of the environment without overpowering the material and surface details.

Conclusion

The project was completed over a 12-week production period as my Master's final environment art project at the University of Staffordshire. The main focus was building a fully modular environment, developing an efficient real-time workflow, and achieving strong visual storytelling through materials, lighting, and composition.

One of the biggest challenges was managing repetition in a large environment while keeping the asset count low. Developing and integrating a layered material system using tiling textures, RGB masking, and vertex painting required learning new technical workflows and careful planning early in production.

Adapting to new tools such as ZBrush and Substance 3D Designer required constant iteration and problem-solving. The most important lesson from this project was the value of starting early and not being afraid to try unfamiliar workflows. Many of the systems used in this scene felt challenging at first, but progress came through experimentation and iteration.

If something feels intimidating, the best way to learn is simply to start and figure it out step by step. For my acknowledgments and final note: I would like to thank Human Esmaeili for his constant guidance and feedback throughout the project, and Daniel Cormino for the layered material setup walkthrough, which was extremely helpful during production.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat. Thank you for reading, and be sure to check out my ArtStation for more of my work.

Uday Aklade, 3D Prop & Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine