Breakdown: Stylized Ship With Blender's Geometry Nodes

Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Alex Verik, and I'm a 3D Environment and Character Artist. A lot has happened since my last interview, especially here in Ukraine, where I live, and unfortunately, I wasn't able to work for quite some time because of that.

Before that, I worked on three projects, two of which were released: Joykis 2 and Tribute, where I created all the characters. Over the last two years, I've also been working on an indie MMO called Seekers of the Ancient, which is currently in early access.

I'm grateful to 80 Level for showing interest in my work and inviting me to share a bit more about the process behind creating the ship from this artwork.

Workflow

My task was to come up with and make a world for a new game in a short time. So I came up with all sorts of quick ways to create a world and assets for it. Today, I'd like to show and explain a few of those approaches.

Since I didn't have a concept to work from, I needed to create a recognizable ship design from scratch. So I started by collecting reference examples that I liked:

Since the ship is a fairly simple model made up of a wooden base and a few masts, it's easy to quickly blockout:

Now it's time to add more detail: cover the base with planks and add beams to introduce shape variation.

To make the process easier and maintain a consistent visual style for the game, I reused planks and beams that were originally created for the farm buildings.

You can check out the Adventures Farm itself and its assets at the following link. Here's an example of how quickly you can achieve this kind of shape in sculpting:

I used the same general approach for all wooden surfaces. For retopology, I kept things simple, just basic boxes with beveled edges to soften the silhouette. Eventually, these meshes will be used for Blender's Geometry Nodes workflow.

Texturing was even more straightforward. Since the goal wasn't to create complex, detailed maps but rather to make something that looks like stylized wood, I used a Curvature mask to generate shading with darker inner edges and bright highlights along the outer edges. I then fine-tuned the final result inside the Unreal Engine shader.

This is what it looks like in Substance 3D Painter:

Following the same principle, I also created the tiling wood textures used across the model. And then comes the magic of Blender's Geometry Nodes.

Ship Base

The next step was assigning materials to the base of the ship. To make it easier to place beams along the hull, custom Geometry Nodes were created. They use a single beam mesh and a curve, with adjustable parameters for internal subdivisions, which allows full control over the smoothness of the bend and the polygon density.

When using curves, I could also control twisting and width dynamically (as shown in the video example below):

Using Mirror and Array modifiers, I was able to quickly decorate the ship with additional structural beams.

Here you can see another iteration using the same setup:

Once the base structure was ready, I added smaller details such as windows, metallic parts, and masts using modular elements created earlier in the project.

By adding subdivisions to the sails and applying alpha-masked torn edges, we got this ship:

Conclusion

The entire process took me around 8 hours, and it was a personal challenge I'd been wanting to try for a while, building a ship using this modular and procedural approach. I hope you enjoyed this method!

You can also see what Geometry Nodes were used to create the houses here.

P.S. I was asked to share how I set up the lighting for the scene, but since this is an open-world game, the lighting setup was complex and took quite a bit of time. That topic could easily fill a separate article. That's why I just placed the ship into an existing environment and rendered the final image you see above.

Alex Verik, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford