Breakdown: Turning 2D Concept Art Into a Fantasy 3D Village Scene

Introduction

Hi Everyone! I'm Laney Desroches, an Environment Artist and 3D modeler based in Montréal, Canada. I began my journey in 3D in 2019 at Collège La Cité in Ontario. At the time, I originally planned to pursue traditional art, but at the last minute I chose 3D as an alternative without really knowing what it involved, which is a decision that today I am so happy I made. That first experience was challenging, and I ended up failing my first semester.

However, I gave it another shot the following year with a completely different mindset. I committed fully to learning and improving, and over the next two years, I developed a strong foundation in 3D art. My efforts led to a recommendation from one of my teachers, which helped me land a job at Hybride VFX in Montréal as a 3D modeler.

During my three years there, I had the chance to contribute to several amazing projects such as The Mandalorian, Andor, Ahsoka, and most recently The Mandalorian & Grogu. Much of my work has been within the Star Wars universe, which aligns closely with my passion for science fiction. After those 3 years, I wanted to have stronger personal projects, so I decided to go to Think Tank Training Centre to strengthen my knowledge and to commit a year and a half to just personal projects. Which, for now, has only been sci-fi.

The Secret Village

For this third project at Think Tank, however, I wanted to push myself beyond my usual scope and explore something new. Stepping away from sci-fi, I challenged myself to get out of my comfort zone and create a fantasy environment.

Reference Gathering

The moment I saw the original concept made by Li Moly, I immediately fell in love with it. The perspective and the sense of depth created this feeling of mystery and exploration that I wanted to replicate. From there, I gathered my references.

Like medieval architecture for the houses, different versions of Gothic churches, references of vertical mountains, cliffs, and fields of vegetation. Having few but strong references helped me have a clear idea while still leaving room for creativity throughout the project.

Blockout

For the blockout, my main goal was to get the camera angle right from the beginning. I spent a lot of time making sure the focal length, scale, and overall proportions felt believable. Once I was happy with the composition, everything else became much easier to build around because I already had a strong foundation.

Mountains

The mountains were the first assets I tackled because they define the entire scene. I used ZBrush with Gaea, finishing everything with displacement for extra detail. I started by sculpting a rough base in ZBrush, then exported it into Gaea, where I added several Erosion nodes to create more natural formations. What helped me with rock details on top was this YouTube video. It was super helpful to get details quickly!

Mountain Arches

One fun trick I used was for the mountain arches in the background. Instead of sculpting them directly, I generated mountains regularly and sandwiched them, which naturally created arch shapes and made my life a lot easier.

Church

I knew the church would be the focal point, so I invested most of my time into it. I designed it with a Gothic style and built many parts modularly, allowing me to reuse most pieces while still adding a lot of unique detail. The goal was to show its scale and importance through the density of its architecture.

Houses

I intentionally kept the houses much simpler than the church. I wanted the contrast to tell a story: the church represents prestige and power, while the village below feels modest. That difference helps naturally guide the eye toward the focal point.

Foliage

For vegetation, I generated the trees in SpeedTree, while the grass and vines came from Quixel Megascans. I used MASH to distribute the foliage and controlled the placement with the strengthened map in the visibility node. It created more natural-looking clusters instead of an even distribution.

Texturing

Only a few assets in the project actually have UVs: the church, the houses, and the front arch. Those were textured traditionally in Substance 3D Painter. Everything else in the scene uses V-Ray Triplanar projections combined with displacement stacked in VrayLayeredTextures.

For the mountains and landscapes, I used photographs of real rock formations, modified them into a big texture sheet in Photoshop, and projected them using V-Ray Triplanar. This allowed me to achieve realistic surface detail very quickly. I also added textures on top to break some areas and add some ambient occlusion and edge highlights. Here are the textures for my main mountain.

Displacement

The mountain displacement was a very important part of the project. I spent a lot of time experimenting with different scales, blending techniques, and values to make them feel believable without becoming repetitive across such a large surface. It was also the same recipe as the textures (VrayLayeredTex with VrayTriplanars).

There was a lot of trial and error, but the displacement ended up making a huge difference in the final quality.

Lighting

For lighting, I started with an HDRI to establish the overall natural illumination. I also used several light blockers to better control the direction of the light and create stronger shadows where needed. Finally, I added a few additional lights to emphasize specific areas that weren't naturally receiving enough light, like the highlight in the foreground arch.

Rendering & Compositin

I rendered my scene in V-Ray and split it into five render layers, which I later composited together in Nuke. The scene had become too complex to render efficiently as a single image, so I separated the layers based on depth. This not only reduced the rendering complexity, but also gave me much more control during compositing.

I spent a lot of time refining the final image in Nuke. Most of that time was dedicated to dialing in the atmospheric fog, depth, color grading, clouds, and subtle camera effects until everything felt believable. Since the size of the environment was so big, I had to make sure the atmospheric fog was heavy to show how far the mountains were.

Conclusion

The project took about four months to complete, since I had a deadline at Think Tank. The biggest challenge was definitely the mountains. Their extremely vertical shapes made them difficult to build while keeping everything looking believable. My favorite part was modeling the church. I genuinely love hard-surface modeling, and adding small architectural details is probably my favorite part of this project.

One of the biggest lessons I learned came from my supervisor, Maciej Biniek. He taught me how to properly use displacement workflows and how to build convincing materials without using UVs. That completely changed the way I approach environment creation and made the workflow much more enjoyable. He also taught me how to comp properly and how to color correct things to look natural. Which was very helpful.

If I had one recommendation for artists, it would be to spend time learning displacement workflows and procedural texturing. Those techniques can save an incredible amount of time while producing highly detailed environments. They're also really fun to experiment with once you become comfortable with the workflow.

Thank you for taking the time to read my breakdown; it really means a lot!

Laney Desroches, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford