Bringing a Cozy 2D Fantasy Cottage Concept Into a 3D World

Introduction

Hello everyone. I'm Trinh Nguyen, a Vietnamese 3D artist currently living in Singapore. My path into 3D art was a bit unconventional. I used to work as a Japanese translator at a tech company in Ho Chi Minh City. After relocating to Singapore in late 2019, the pandemic gave me a lot of time to reflect on what I really wanted to do.

That's when I discovered my passion for 3D environments through games like Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda, and Genshin Impact. I wasn't just hooked on the gameplay; I was mesmerized by the worlds themselves. I kept thinking, "I want to create something like this."

I began by teaching myself through YouTube and online resources before enrolling in CGMA courses to refine my workflow and get guidance from industry professionals. The Cozy Fantasy Cottage is my first complete environment piece, and I'm excited to break down the entire process for you.

The Project

This project was part of CGMA's Environment Art for Games course with Peyton Varney. I wanted to build a complete stylized scene in Unreal Engine that would let me practice hard-surface modeling, sculpting, and vegetation work all in one piece.
  
While browsing ArtStation and Pinterest, I found Seonra Kim's "Cottage" artwork and immediately knew it was the one. The harmonious color palette, clear composition, detailed drawings of the building, and overall mood drew me in. It felt cozy and inviting, but also had this sense of adventure and magic. I couldn't wait to bring it to life in 3D.

For references, I used PureRef to organize everything and kept it open throughout production. I broke down my searches by component (buildings, props, foliage, materials) using keywords like "stylized environment unreal engine", "stylized wood texture", "stylized props breakdown" on sites like ArtStation, 80 Level, and Pinterest. Having those references constantly visible helped me maintain the stylized aesthetic throughout the project.

Blockout & Composition

For composition, I stayed pretty close to the original concept art since Seonra Kim had already nailed the balance and visual flow. I made just a few adjustments: I scaled up the tree to feel more realistic and positioned the house at the center to serve as the main focal point. My goal was to create this cozy yet mysterious floating cottage suspended in the sky.

I started the blockout in Maya, referencing both real-world scale and the proportions from the concept art to make sure everything felt grounded. Once the basic shapes were in place, I brought everything into Unreal Engine to set up the foundation of the scene. 

At this stage, I used the engine's SM_SkySphere and applied a stylized texture to create the skybox. I also positioned my cameras and dialed in the lighting, Exponential Height Fog, and Post Process Volumes to get a sense of the final composition.

For the environment base, I used Runtime Virtual Textures (RVT) to blend the grass and foliage seamlessly with the terrain, following techniques from FastTrack Tutorials. This allowed the vegetation to write color and height information directly onto the landscape surface, creating natural transitions.

House Details

I approached the house using a modular system to keep things efficient. The main structure was built from reusable pieces that snapped together seamlessly in Unreal Engine using vertex snapping.

My workflow started with creating the core textures: plaster, stone, brick, wood trim sheet, and golden metal. I built trim sheets to handle repeating architectural elements like wall trim, beams, and molding across multiple assets. This kept everything visually consistent while saving significant time.

Windows stayed simple. Glass planes used hand-painted textures for that stylized look, while wooden frames came straight from my wood trim sheet. This let me quickly populate the house with varied window styles without modeling each frame from scratch.

The roof tiles started in Substance 3D Designer as a tileable material. Once the texture was done, I created modular roof sections that fit together seamlessly. To add dimension, I modeled individual tiles and used them for the ridge caps and the small roof peaks above the attic windows. These stand-out pieces made the roof feel more handcrafted.

Props & Sculpted Assets

The small props needed to feel lively and charming to match the concept art, so I sculpted each one individually in ZBrush. I constantly referenced photos and the original concept during the sculpting process. My go-to brushes were TrimDynamic for creating smooth bevels and flattening surfaces, and the Orb Brush Pack for adding wood grain, stone cracks, and surface imperfections that brought these props to life.

Vegetation

For the two large hero trees, I used SpeedTree to achieve that organic branching structure and proper scale. My workflow started by creating textures for the tree trunk and tree canopy in Maya and Substance 3D Designer. Once the textures were ready, I imported them into SpeedTree to assemble the complete tree. SpeedTree made it easy to export directly into Unreal Engine 5 using the .st9 format.

For grass, small plants, and flowers, I went with a texture atlas workflow. I modeled the foliage shapes in Maya, baked the details from high-poly versions onto a single 2048x2048 plane, then textured everything in Substance 3D Painter. Here's an important tip I learned: assign different Material IDs to each foliage type before baking.

This makes creating variations and painting textures infinitely easier later. Once the atlas was done, I used the Multi-Cut tool to carve out individual planes for each plant shape and assembled them into distinct foliage clusters.

Time-Saving Tricks

Looking back, three strategies really made the difference in keeping this project on track.

The modular approach saved me countless hours. Instead of modeling every wall, doorframe, and trim piece from scratch, I built a library of reusable components that could snap together in different ways. It's like having LEGO blocks-the same pieces created endless variations.

Tileable textures were another lifesaver. Rather than painting unique textures for every single surface, I developed a core set of seamless materials that worked across multiple assets. This alone probably saved me a couple of weeks.

Smart Materials in Substance 3D Painter completely changed my workflow. They're like intelligent presets that look at your model and automatically apply dirt, scratches, and wear in all the right places. Corners and edges get more damage, recesses collect grime, and it all happens without tedious hand-painting. Tasks that would've taken days were done in hours with just some tweaking.

Retopology

For the assets that I sculpted in ZBrush, the retopology process was all about keeping my meshes clean and efficient. I removed unnecessary edge loops and kept only the edges that were essential for maintaining each asset's silhouette and form. The goal was to create low-poly versions that were optimized for real-time performance in Unreal Engine while still holding their shapes well.

Once I had my low-poly versions ready, I unwrapped them in RizomUV. I really like RizomUV's tools for minimizing stretching and maximizing texture space, which was crucial for getting the most out of my texture budgets. After unwrapping, I baked all the details from my high-poly sculpts in ZBrush down to the low-poly models.

The entire pipeline was pretty straightforward: sculpt high-poly in ZBrush, retopologize to create clean low-poly versions, unwrap in RizomUV, then bake to transfer all that detail over.

Texturing Workflow

For texturing, I worked across three main tools: Substance 3D Designer, Substance 3D Painter, and Photoshop, each serving a specific purpose in my workflow.

For repeating surfaces, I used Substance 3D Designer because it gave me complete control over creating seamless, tileable textures that could scale across large surfaces without visible repetition. The node-based workflow is incredibly easy to create variations and tweak parameters later, and I could reuse these graphs for other projects down the line.

Unique Assets in Substance 3D Painter

For props and one-off pieces that needed hand-painted detail, I turned to Substance 3D Painter because it allowed me to paint directly on the model and see exactly how the textures wrapped around the geometry in real-time.

Photoshop for Stylized Details and Corrections

Photoshop played a supporting but important role in my workflow. I used it primarily to hand-paint stylized glass textures to get that specific stylized look I wanted. It was also invaluable for cleaning up texture maps when the baking process had small artifacts or errors. I found myself using it most often to fix ambient Occlusion Maps, touching up areas where shadows were too harsh or incorrectly baked.

Material Setup in Unreal Engine

Once my textures were ready, I brought everything into Unreal and set up different types of materials depending on the asset type. For the hard-surface assets like the house and props. I created master materials with exposed parameters.

This let me make material instances that shared the same base logic but could have different colors, roughness values, or detail intensities. It was a huge time-saver when I wanted variations without rebuilding materials from scratch.

The foliage required a different approach. I set up materials with two-sided rendering and used masked blend mode for the alpha cutout on leaves. I also added subtle subsurface scattering to give the leaves that soft, translucent quality when backlit, and included a wind parameter that connected to Unreal's foliage wind system for gentle movement.

For glass materials, I built a shader with a Translucent blend mode and hand-painted textures to achieve that stylized, slightly imperfect look rather than perfectly clean glass. I adjusted the opacity and roughness to control how much you could see through the windows while still maintaining the hazy effect.

I also created a stylized water shader to match the overall fantasy aesthetic of the environment. The shader uses panning normal maps to simulate gentle surface ripples, giving the water a sense of calm and subtle motion. I also adjusted the refraction and depth fade parameters to create a more natural transition between shallow and deep areas, enhancing the visual depth and softness of the water.

Decorating the Scene

Once modeling, texturing, and materials were complete, I moved into scene assembly, carefully dressing the environment based on the concept art. I started by placing hero elements like the cottage and large trees to establish focal points, then arranged props following the concept's composition while keeping some natural variation.

The stone pathway acted as a leading line toward the cottage, and I constantly referenced the original concept to maintain the same charm and balance.

For foliage scattering, I used Unreal's Foliage Paint tool with settings for scale variation and terrain alignment to keep everything organic. Larger foliage assets were hand-placed where they mattered most.

To bring the scene to life, I created Niagara systems for falling leaves, fire, and smoke. The falling leaves used sprite particles with wind forces for that peaceful autumn feeling, while the fire and smoke emitters added warmth and activity around the campfire.

Finding the right balance was crucial. The scene needed enough detail to feel inviting but not so much that it lost its cozy atmosphere.

Lighting & Post-Production.

I kept my lighting setup relatively simple but effective. Beyond the Skylight, I used one Directional Light as my main sun source, two Spotlights, and one Point Light to fill in darker areas. Since I wanted to achieve a soft, warm, and peaceful atmosphere, I pushed everything toward warm color temperatures.

For post-production, I relied heavily on the Post-Process Volume to dial in the final look. One crucial setting I want to highlight is enabling Infinite Extent (Unbound). This is essential because it makes the post-process effects apply to the entire level regardless of where the camera is positioned.

Without checking this box, the effects would only work when the camera is physically inside the volume's bounds, which would cause inconsistent visuals during camera movements and ruin the cohesive look I was going for.

Then I adjusted the exposure compensation with Min/Max EV100 values around -0.5 to prevent the scene from getting too bright or too dark across all camera angles. The Vignette Intensity was set to 0.64 to naturally draw the eye toward the center cottage. I also added a subtle Bloom effect (around 1.95 intensity) to make the warm lights glow softly and enhance that cozy, magical feeling.

For the final renders, I set up four distinct camera angles in Sequencer to showcase different aspects of the scene. Each camera sequence was set to 300 frames, which gave me smooth 10-second clips at 30fps to really let viewers explore the environment from multiple perspectives.The camera movements themselves were subtle, slow orbits and gentle pushes that guide the viewer's eye through the composition without being distracting to maintain that dreamy, relaxed feeling throughout.

An important detail was that I added engine warm-up frames to ensure any physics simulations, foliage wind animations, and particle effects were fully settled before the actual render began. This prevented any pop-in or initialization artifacts at the start of each shot.

Conclusion

The entire project took about 10 weeks from initial concept to final render. It was an intense but incredibly rewarding journey.

The biggest challenge was matching the concept art style and maintaining visual consistency throughout the scene. The original concept had such a distinctive look, and I had to figure out how to translate that into 3D while keeping the charm and feel intact.

Every material needed to work together harmoniously, from the wood textures to the foliage to the props. Making sure everything felt like it belonged in the same world required constant iteration and comparison back to the original concept.

On the workflow side, time management was tough. Juggling multiple software packages while maintaining consistency across multiple assets required strict weekly milestones and a lot of discipline.

This project taught me so much. The biggest technical breakthrough was mastering Runtime Virtual Textures in Unreal Engine, which completely changed how I approach landscape and foliage blending. I also significantly improved my lighting, camera setup, and rendering workflow. I learned to light scenes more efficiently and render more strategically instead of just cranking up settings and hoping for the best.

Looking forward, I know there are still areas where I can grow, particularly in creating more complex procedural materials and optimizing my sculpting workflow in ZBrush. But that's the beauty of this journey. There's always something new to master.

My advice for beginner artists would be to build your reference library religiously. Every image you save becomes part of your visual vocabulary and will save you countless hours.

Start with projects you can actually finish. I chose this cottage because the scope felt challenging but achievable. Completing one solid piece beats having five unfinished projects.

Be disciplined with yourself. Set concrete deadlines and stick to them. Talent is great, but consistency is what finishes projects. There were weeks when I didn't feel inspired, but I showed up and did the work anyway. That made all the difference.

Creating this as someone transitioning from a completely different career showed me it's never too late to chase what excites you. To anyone on the fence about pursuing 3D art, start now. Don't wait until you feel "ready" or until you have all the answers. Pick a concept that moves you, break it down into manageable pieces, and take it one asset at a time. 

Thank you for reading about my process. If this helps even one person take that first step, then sharing this journey was worth it. Keep creating, keep learning, and believe in your vision.

Trinh Nguyen, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins