Combining Two Concepts to Create a Stylized Colorful Beach Bar

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Maja Banas. You may have seen my name on here before, talking about some of my other environment pieces, but if not, then here's a quick introduction. I'm currently a student in Digital Arts & Entertainment (DAE) of Howest University of Applied Sciences, studying game graphics production with a minor in style. I specialise in environment art, and have a strong passion for sculpting and texturing. 

I fell in love with 3D for the first time when I came to Howest to try it out, which was nearly 3 years ago now. I had never tried 3D before this point, but I had found a real interest in it and motivation to learn, so I'm glad I took the risk. The past three years have flown by. Along the way, I feel I've definitely discovered what I love doing, which has helped me narrow down my career path.

I'm thrilled to have found something that I hold so much interest in and love, and I'm incredibly excited to step into the industry next year when I find an internship. I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to share my workflow with you again. In this post, I'll walk you through my entire process for my Tiki Beach Bar and share the key lessons I learned along the way. I hope you find these insights helpful and enjoy the breakdown!

Tiki Beach Bar Inspiration

This project started off as work for an assignment for my sculpting class, where we were tasked with creating a small storefront. I wanted to choose a project with strong stylisation that would be a fun challenge to push me when translating into 3D. 

Until this point, my work was more heavily focused on realistic environments and props. This project gave me the perfect excuse to step out of my comfort zone, push the stylization, and finally experiment with using some more bold shapes and colors, which is something I had been wanting to try for a while now. 

Initially, I was struggling to find a single piece of concept art that both fit the brief and my personal taste. Instead, I looked through my inspiration collections on ArtStation and decided to combine elements from two pieces I loved to create something unique. I loved this pitaya hut concept from ZC Wang, and I really envisioned this for the main structure of the shop.

I also loved the COCO LOCO concept from Etienne Savoie, from which I incorporated some elements for the shop accessories.

I created a few photobash versions and settled on a final concept that offered great sculpting opportunities, and everything fit together very well.

As I was using this as a bit more of an opportunity for some experimentation I wasn't sure if this was going to be something I would want to polish for my portfolio, but the more I worked on it, the more I enjoyed it, so after a few weeks I decided that once I finish the sculpt course I would want to take this piece further and put it in a small serene beach scene. 

Getting Started

I began by blocking out the bar in Blender. I used F-Spy to quickly help me map out the angles and perspective of the concept art, which significantly sped up the process of nailing the proportions and shapes. As it was the blockout phase, I focused on capturing the large shapes that define the silhouette, knowing I would sculpt the finer details later on. 

For the sculpting course, we were encouraged to use clean subdivisions for ZBrush rather than using ZRemesher or DynaMesh to maintain better control over the topology. Therefore, before exporting, I ensured that each piece had even quad distribution. Although this isn't always the standard pipeline, it did come in very useful when creating the low-poly mesh for Unreal Engine.

Once the blockout was finished, I could finally take it into ZBrush. Here I went in and for each piece fixed the polygroups and subdivided the meshes to give them a higher polycount for sculpting. After this, I could finally begin the fun part. I really wanted to push myself with this piece, and I wanted to try to get it as close to the concept as possible.

I took it upon myself to sculpt out each piece individually rather than using any repeating meshes. This not only gave me more practice but also ensured the final result felt organic and hand-crafted.

When it came to sculpting the wood, of which I had a lot in my scene, I had a very specific workflow that I used, working from big to small shapes. At first, I would go in with the Trim Dynamic brush and add the big bevels around the edges, cleaning them up with the Orb Flatten brush.

Then I would use the mask lasso tool to mask out big sections that I could then move to create height and thickness variations in the planks.

Then I would again go in with the mask lasso tool, moving it ever so slightly with the Move brush to add the wood grain.

And finally, I would go in and add all the smaller shapes, such as wooden cracks and other small details.

Here are some showcase images of my sculpts:

Texturing

The base colors for this project were created entirely in ZBrush with the polypaint tool. Every prop, including the bar itself, is fully hand-painted. After I got the hang of it, the painting became quite fun, and I'd definitely consider it one of the most enjoyable parts of the project. I first worked with painting on the gradients onto all the pieces, just working with the Standard brush, as I feel it gives a nice airbrush blend.

I would then go in and add texture details and color variations with a smaller size brush, and then finally, I would add the edge highlights using the help of the Polish brush, then paint over them to make the highlights pop even more.

Here is how the final colors looked in a render engine:

Once the polypaint was complete and the low-poly mesh was ready, I moved into Substance 3D Painter to bake the vertex colors onto the mesh. To create the Roughness map quickly, I repurposed the base color. I applied the base color maps in the Roughness channel and then inverted them with levels.

This ensured that the highlighted edges were less rough while crevices and shadows remained rougher. I did go into some areas manually to add some extra Roughness variations, but this was not necessary in most areas.

Assembling the Scene

As I said before, the idea to make the scene came a bit later on during the project, but I really envisioned this Tiki bar on a quiet, inviting beach. Since I wanted the focus to remain on the bar, I didn't create any complex environment concepts.

In Unreal Engine, I played around with some potential compositions. I experimented with compositions using free placeholder assets to find the right feel for the composition.

Once the composition was set, I replaced the placeholder meshes with my own assets. This included all the scatter assets, palm trees, deck planks, stones, and crabs.

The biggest challenge was the space. A beach scene can easily look boring if it's too empty, but it can also start feeling too cluttered if there are too many trees, for example. After several iterations, I found a balance that felt natural.

To bring the scene to life, I added some final touches, like wind to the leaves of the palm trees, added some motions to the water with some slight water splashes at the coastlines, added also some slight sand grains moving in the wind in the foreground of the scene, made a simple animation for the crabs, and added the flying birds in the background.

Lighting

I kept the lighting relatively simple to maintain the stylized look. I used one Directional light that did most of the heavy lifting. I also added a few blue-tinted lights that hit the top of the building to introduce a slight hue shift.

To guide the viewer's eyes, I placed artificial shadows in the foreground. This created a value gradient that pushed the focus towards the brightly lit Tiki Bar and prevented the scene from looking flat. In post-processing, I slightly boosted the saturation and added a faint blue tint to the shadows to deepen the tropical atmosphere.

Here's a showcase of the final renders:

Conclusion

This project was a great journey of firsts for me. Stepping away from my usual style and workflows made me realize how much I enjoy exploring new ways of working. Although this was a super fun experience, of course, it came with a few challenges. I had to consciously break my habit of using realistic proportions to stay true to the concept's unique art style. Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, finding the balance for the beach environment was much trickier than I had anticipated. I had to walk a fine line to make the scene feel intentionally empty without letting it become visually boring.

This experience taught me a lot about stylized art and how it isn't just "simplified realism," it requires lots of intentional decisions about shapes and silhouettes, and also colors to make the piece succeed. Hand-painting the textures also gave me a deeper understanding of how light and form interact in a way I hadn't experienced before, allowing me to give the bar a level of personality that I don't think I would have been able to achieve with procedural textures. 

I think the biggest takeaway from this project is to step out of your comfort zone. If you've been thinking about trying something new for a while, just go for it. Pushing your boundaries is exactly how you discover what you love doing. It can feel overwhelming to commit to a big change, but if you just take it one thing at a time, stay patient with yourself, and remember to have fun with it, you might just discover your new favourite way to work. 

Thank you for reading through my breakdown! I hope that maybe some of what I shared can help some of you on your own 3D journeys. I'm incredibly excited to see what the future holds as I look for an internship for next year, and I look forward to sharing more art with you all soon!

Maja Banas, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins