Building Wayfinder-Inspired Stylized French Cottage Environment

Introduction

Hello! My name is Eloi Landes. I am an Environment Artist, 3D artist, and a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I got into 3D very early on by playing with CAD software my father brought home, and later moved on to Blender, which I have been using for over 10 years now. I learned drawing and sculpting during my studies at the École Émile Cohl, and I specialized in video games during my Master's degree. My internship and subsequent assignments at Artefacts Studio professionalized my skills and gradually steered me toward 3D environment art.

I worked for a year and a half as an Environment, Level, and Material Artist on the tactical RPG Disciples: Domination within a small team. Recently, I have been applying my skills to educational virtual reality projects focused on environmental issues in Southeast Asia. I work as a 3D artist, but my scope extends to game design, narrative design, and project management. Wearing these different hats made me very versatile and taught me to care about in-game performance constraints. Since VR is extremely restrictive, I wanted to work on a more flexible project during my free time.

The French Alps Chalet Project

The French Alps Chalet project started over 3 years ago when I wanted to tackle a complete environment project in Unreal Engine alongside my studies. It allowed me to learn the basics of the engine and stylized environments. A year ago, I decided to update my portfolio with projects that better represented my current skill level. Since I liked the original composition and environment elements, but the final render no longer matched my standards, I reopened the project to give it a complete revamp. In the end, I remade almost every asset from scratch.

The project is inspired by the traditional architecture of my home region, Haute-Savoie in France. I set myself the challenge of creating a stylized interpretation of these mountain chalets and translating various architectural features and materials (cladding, wooden balconies, foliage, etc.) into a simplified visual language.

First, I gathered photographs of local chalets in PureRef, focusing on specific close-ups of materials and assets.

On the side, I compiled references from different art directions I wanted to explore. My primary inspirations were Wayfinder, the work of Taylor Smith, and Overwatch.

By studying Wayfinder and Overwatch, I explored the work of various artists in detail to understand their visual codes and techniques (such as the treatment of wood and trees in Wayfinder, the colors of Overwatch, and Taylor Smith's approach to simplifying vegetation and environments) so I could adapt them into my own style. All references were organized into a PureRef board that evolved over time and was constantly open while I worked.

Modeling

I built the composition directly inside the engine. Having no concept art to rely on, I chose to establish the composition using the blockout by gradually placing the elements I wanted to show. The staging idea is quite simple: the chalet serves as the central focal point, and secondary elements are arranged to guide the eye toward it. The composition is split across 3 depth planes to enhance perspective, developed through numerous iterations using different camera setups. For the blockout itself, I modeled simplified versions of my assets in Blender, quickly imported them into the engine, and arranged them alongside the terrain.

For the assets, I started with a Blender blockout and imported it fairly quickly into ZBrush, as I am comfortable sculpting there. In ZBrush, I worked on each asset using basic brushes and relying heavily on the Lasso Mask tool.

Tip: The Lasso Mask tool allows for many different effects. For instance, combining it with the Move brush yields great results, but I encourage you to experiment with other brushes like hPolish or TrimDynamic.

Wood: I went through several sculpting passes to achieve a satisfying result, keeping the wooden elements in Wayfinder in mind. To achieve a result like this, I initially used alphas that I applied to the geometry as a mask, then used the Inflate function with the right axis activated, and finally reworked the shape with the Lasso Mask, Move brush, and hPolish brush. I applied this treatment to every wooden asset in the scene.

Vegetation: I took advantage of this project to explore different workflows. The final foliage elements are a mix of ZBrush sculpts for some and subdivided elements created in Blender for others. Once these elements were created, I baked them in Substance 3D Designer to work on their detailed textures and normals. For assembly, I decided to build the vegetation elements by hand to maintain maximum visual control while paying close attention to each silhouette.

Trees: The trunks were sculpted by hand using a workflow similar to that of the other assets, while alpha maps were used for the foliage cards. 

Rocks: The rock workflow was fairly classic. I created basic blockouts in Blender and modified them heavily in ZBrush, first using the TrimSmoothBorder brush with a square alpha, then polishing them with the same brushes used for the other assets.

Retopology

Since I am very comfortable with Blender, I try to keep most of my workflow within the software. For retopology, I used the RetopoFlow plug-in, which worked efficiently given the simplicity of the meshes I had. I aimed for a low-poly result to practice optimizing geometry.

For UVs, I relied on Blender's native tools alongside plugins like UV Toolkit to speed up unwrapping. I tried to place UV seams in less visible areas. Assets were baked into several different atlases to optimize texture space and ensure a consistent pixel ratio across the scene.

Texturing

This project allowed me to really explore techniques I was not previously comfortable with. I was trained to favor procedural workflows due to their efficiency in production. However, for this piece, I wanted to jump into a workflow much closer to a traditional "hand-painted" look.

The assets were textured in three steps:

Substance 3D Painter (Base Pass): I laid down a base using simple colors and procedural generators. A technique that worked really well was applying a Gradient Map over a Light Generator to control the specific color tones of lights and shadows.

3D-Coat & Photoshop (Detail Pass): Once satisfied with my base, I sent the assets into 3D-Coat, using it in two ways. First, in a classic way, I picked a round brush and started detailing my textures using a graphics tablet. Second, I heavily utilized the "Send Projections..." feature to edit textures directly in Photoshop based on camera angles. In Photoshop, I relied on a workflow from my concept art classes: using the Lasso tool almost exclusively. This allowed me to work very rapidly while maintaining control over soft gradients and crisp hard-edge transitions. Photoshop is where I spent the majority of my time.

Substance 3D Painter (Final Adjustments): Finally, I sent these textures back into my Substance 3D file to adjust colors and contrast, and add gradient passes where needed. I also used the hand-painted Base Color map to drive my Roughness map generation.

From a technical perspective, I created a simple master shader used across all regular assets in the scene. It utilizes 3 textures: Base Color, Normal, and a Mask (Metallic/Roughness/Ambient Occlusion/Height). This shader also allows better blending with the ground using a Virtual Texture that samples terrain values to generate a smooth gradient upon ground contact.

Foliage Textures: I used Substance 3D Designer with a few touch-ups in Photoshop. Earlier iterations were more complex, with detailed normals, but for an art direction like this, keeping foliage normals simple helps them blend naturally with the ground and surrounding elements.

Tip: To stylize vegetation normals, I used a Quantize node on the normals. It gives more stepped values that work particularly well on foliage.

Terrain: I created a texture set in Substance 3D Designer using simple colors and minimal detail so as not to distract the player's eye. A simple terrain shader samples a Height value for each texture to achieve natural layer blending (5 texture sets compose the terrain in total).

Rocks: The rocks use a mask-based workflow. In Substance 3D Painter, I baked the rock normals and generated a mask map combining Curvature, AO, and a blending mask. These textures are sampled in a custom shader that lets me control the presence of these different masks in the final visual. A seamless rock texture created in Substance Designer tiles according to object scale, while a light noise pass adds subtle diversity across instances. This approach allows scaling rocks fairly freely without texel ratio issues while keeping textures relatively small.

Tiling textures: To deal with tiling textures, I created them in Substance 3D Designer, trying to match the hand-painted look of the assets. I tried to keep these textures simple to make the hand-painted assets more visible. Here are some breakdowns of 3D Designer files:

For the building, every tiling texture comes with a variation, allowing me to blend them using vertex color.

Composition

The final scene was assembled iteratively by building on top of my old project base and replacing assets one by one.

For vegetation, I used Unreal Engine's Foliage Tool, tweaking density, scale variation, and rotation to scatter most ground plants. I then hand-placed key elements, especially trees, to tightly control the final camera composition. Most props were placed manually; as the scene is small, there was no real reason to turn to procedural workflows. My various assets allowed me to build small story vignettes around the chalet to add life to the environment.

Lighting

For lighting, I used Lumen. Wanting to get more familiar with the tool, I followed William Faucher's Lighting in Unreal Engine 5 for Beginners tutorial and relied on the Env. Light Mixer panel to adjust all my lighting values from a central interface. Gradually, I leaned toward a fairly colorful lighting setup with a pronounced blue ambient value.

In the end, the lighting setup is very simple and relies mainly on Lumen's capabilities. To control the composition a bit better, localized fog cards were placed by hand. Post-processing was kept minimal, adding slight bloom, subtle film grain, and minor color grading adjustments.

For the clouds and chimney smoke, I created simple stylized shaders:

Clouds: To reinforce the composition, I opted for clouds based on alpha planes placed in 3D space, which gave me direct control over leading lines and contrast. The clouds were painted in Photoshop and assembled on planes in the scene.

Smoke: The chimney smoke uses an alpha map scrolling over a mesh to give that stylized look.

Conclusion

In the end, I worked in my free time for over a year to update this project, in the background, whenever I had the time and energy outside of my full-time job. Some elements took time because I allowed myself room to explore different techniques and workflows.

The project came with two main production challenges:

Maintaining long-term motivation: We tend to want to move on to a new project without finishing the current one. Sometimes it is better to let a project rest for a few days, come back with a fresh look, and set small incremental goals to move forward step by step.

Visual consistency: Achieving a cohesive environment while mixing different texturing techniques (procedural Substance 3D Designer vs. hand-painted 3D-Coat/Photoshop) required many iteration passes to find a satisfying balance.

For future projects, I now have a clearer vision of stylized production pipelines. Setting a realistic scope is essential because these techniques take a lot of time, and I was sometimes frustrated not having the time to push every asset as far as I wanted.

My main advice for beginner artists (and in reality, all artists) is: do not be afraid of feedback. Finding experienced artists and asking for critique is one of the most effective ways to progress. While working on this scene, I reached a point where I needed outside eyes to move forward. Thanks to feedback from Romain Durand and my former lead David Frappaz, a few concise critiques helped me push the project to the next level. I strongly encourage new artists to seek professional feedback, keep project scopes small to prioritize quality over quantity, and try out a new technique on every project.

Thank you for reading, and thanks to 80LV for giving me the opportunity to share my work here! If you are interested, other works can be found on my ArtStation. And if you happen to be looking for an Environment Artist, know that I am available starting in January to collaborate with you!

Eloi Landes, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins