Breakdown: Making 3D Landscape Look Like Painting

Introduction 

Hi! I’m Alex, a 3D environment artist from Ukraine, focusing on natural environments. My journey in the world of 3D began as a hobby, as I really loved nature and enjoyed drawing landscapes. Over time, it gradually turned into a profession, and since then, I’ve contributed to the creation of several games, usually in a realistic art style or in a style influenced by the German school of Romanticism and artists like Shishikin.

As I grew a bit tired of realism, I decided to start a personal project with a more expressive and raw style. “Last Days of Warmth” is the first piece in that series. Let’s break it down a bit.

Last Days of Warmth

The main inspiration for the scene was this painting by David Mensing – full of rich, vibrant colors, expressive brush, and painting knife strokes, as well as punchy accents. Truly, a beautiful piece! I knew it would be a challenge to recreate it in 3D, achieving a soft and rough look at the same time. I also drew inspiration from Arcane and Disco Elysium, but here, it’s mostly in the sky, as I’m still working on the architecture elements for the next piece, which will share the same art direction.

Vegetation | Textures

Since this is a nature-only scene, vegetation plays a huge role, especially the trees, as they serve as compositional pillars.

I wanted the trees to feel stylized and painterly, yet retain the essential details of the real thing. I built a multi-layered material that would use broad strokes to define color gradients, knots, and lenticels without introducing excessive visual noise.

At its core, it’s a simple noise map that defines the base shape. It is overlaid with subtle hints of bark details and blended together using a generous amount of slope blur. The image here shows the base bark layer, which is later enhanced in-engine with a color macro for some crazy colors, along with a darker, aged bark variant near the base of the trunk.

For the leaves, I kept things simple: it’s all based on just one texture. I played around with slope blur and levels, feeding it brushstrokes and rough leaf shapes, picking the ones I liked the most into the cluster texture. That’s it, all the color work is done later inside Unreal Engine. 

The grasses, however, asked for more data to feed into their materials, for visual variety in both shape and color and to marry them with the terrain. So, each grass texture has 2-3 layers to it: opacity, ground gradient, and color variation. These are later controlled via material parameters in-engine. The layers themselves were hand-painted in Adobe Fresco and then processed and combined in Adobe Substance 3D.

For the fir trees, I created a hand-painted texture: a jagged, blocky opacity map and a colorful mess for dead, mature, and young branches – all painted with a simple square Oil brush in Adobe Fresco. The trunk material was made similarly to the birch, using Adobe Substance 3D.

Vegetation | Modeling & Setup

I approached modeling trees the same way I do in realistic workflows – with attention to the details, focusing on dead branches, peeling bark, and tiny twigs placed near the base of the trunk, without introducing too much noise. The leaves – stylized as brushstrokes – were mostly placed procedurally: large strokes at the base of the branch and smaller ones a bit further away. I also added a layer of leaves floating in the air, disconnected from the rest and breaking up the silhouette a bit. I manually trimmed some leaves on the lower branches for a more polished look.

To fluff them up, I created a blobby shell in Blender around the canopies for each deciduous tree to project normals onto the foliage. Lastly, I set up and baked AO into vertex colors, which is then used later in the UE material, multiplied by a blocky noise, to drive a gradient from bright yellow to orange and to influence the subsurface scattering settings.

All custom grasses were assembled in SpeedTree as well. The coloration process for some of those was driven by the UE landscape layer info.

Rocks

The rocks are essentially a bunch of spheres with some Worley Cellular noise applied to them in Houdini. I painted some masks for them in Substance 3D Painter to drive the colors later in-engine.

Sky, Lighting & Post-Processing

The lighting setup is rather simple – just a single directional light. 

To make the sky more visually interesting, I used a panning smoky sky texture, combined with hand-painted colorful clouds and brushstroke-like fog, all cards. This approach helped to tie everything together stylistically. 

For post-processing, I slightly boosted saturation and contrast, tweaked the slope, toe, and shoulder of the tone mapper, applied subtle color correction, and added a bit of grain in the shadows. Combined with a bit of bloom and increased fog density, I introduced a slight color enhancement with stylized fog post-process material to achieve a more expressive mood.

Conclusion

This project was an experiment and quite a refreshing change for me – to move away from strict realism and express something more expressive and unusual, something new. I learned a lot from it, and I’m already working on the next piece in the series, where I aim to push the style even further.

Thanks for reading – I hope it inspires you to experiment too! It’s always rewarding to try something new and then see it take shape. Please feel free to message me on ArtStation if you have any questions.

Alexander Maznev, Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins