Crafting a Stylized Fishing Village with ZBrush, Gaea & Unreal Engine

Introduction

Hello, my name is Cristian Iurasciuc, I am 23 years old and originally from Romania, and I specialize in 3D environment art for games.

My journey into environmental art started during my university studies in Interior Design in Bucharest, Romania. During that time, I had a class focused on 3D modelling, which sparked my interest in the 3D field. I quickly realised this is something I truly enjoyed.

After completing my bachelor's degree, I decided to focus more seriously on developing my skills in game art. I began studying 3D on my own through various tutorials and courses, learning tools and workflows used in the industry. However, I felt that my work still needed improvement to reach the level required by AAA game studios.

That’s when I discovered Think Tank Training Centre. The program offered a structured learning environment, mentorship from industry professionals, and the opportunity to develop a strong portfolio. This experience helped me push my skills further and create my Advanced Term project, “Fishing Village.”

The Fishing Village

I developed this project over the course of 4 months. My main goal was to create a large-scale environment centred around two organic hero props, supported by a highly reusable modular kit of wooden planks and a nanite landscape. I aimed for the kit to be flexible so it could be reused throughout the scene while still maintaining visual variety.

I was interested in creating an environment with a rainy atmosphere and an abandoned, decayed, and creepy mood.

While searching for references, I came across the concept art by Brandon Le, which resonated with the mood I was looking for. Instead of recreating this concept one-to-one, I used two of his artworks as inspiration and extracted key elements from them. My goal was to merge those ideas and reinterpret them into a cohesive and believable environment that fits naturally within a game setting.

Blockout

I started by blocking out the main structures and buildings, as well as defining where the water and shoreline would be. At the same time, I made sure everything aligned with the trajectory of the boat so the scene would read well from the intended camera path. Below are some early concepting images and the water structures, along with some shore structure references.

Workflow for the Modular Assets

After finishing blocking out the main structures, I began working on sculpting the modular wooden assets that would support the environment. I created three different modular asset types: a pack of 4 wooden planks, a pack of 5 logs, and a pack of 3 wooden boards.

The wooden broken plank assets were mainly used as the ground and walking surfaces of the structures. The logs served as the stability and support elements. The wooden boards were used to build the structural frames of the tents and other constructions.

Breaking the modular kit into these functional groups made it much easier to assemble the environment.

Hero Props Breakdown

For this project, I had to work with both organic sculpting and hard-surface modelling, which require slightly different approaches and mindsets.

Creating the Shark

For the shark, I started with a simple blockout in Maya to establish the overall form and silhouette, and then moved to ZBrush where I gradually refined the shapes. I relied on layering different levels of detail, beginning with large forms and progressively adding medium and small surface details like skin folds, gills, muscles, and subtle damage.

Creating the Octopus

The octopus’s skin used the same workflow, except the hardsurface elements were primarily modelled in Maya and then brought into ZBrush for using boolean techniques in the places where the hardsurface elements go into the skin.

For these hero props, I used a mid-poly ZRemeshed workflow that allowed me to maintain a high level of detail. 

For creating the ropes holding up the shark and the octopus, I brought the assets back into Maya and used them as live objects. I then drew curves directly on the surface to shape the path of the ropes around the models. After defining the curves, I used the Sweep Mesh tool to generate the rope geometry along those paths, which allowed me to quickly create ropes that naturally followed the shape of the assets.

I continued with the UV mapping, aiming for a consistent texel density across the assets and baking out the surface details from the highpoly in Substance Painter.

Materials and Landscape

For the nanite tessellated landscape, I created a basic landscape in Gaea to serve as a starting point and a few masks. I created tileable materials in Substance 3D Designer, which allowed me to blend different surfaces and achieve smoother transitions across the terrain.

I used Unreal Sensei's landscape material along with my materials created in Designer and some masks from Gaea. My favourite tool from his material was the CellBomb, which allowed me to improve my landscape and hide repetition.

For Improving the terrain I also blended some rock megascans and a few of my props such as the boat by using RVT Blending to further enhance its aspect.

Marvelous Designer Fabrics

Marvelous Designer played an important role in the project. I used it to create all the cloth and fabric elements in the environment.

For the large tent where the shark is hanging, I first imported the blockout of the supporting structure from Maya. This helped guide the overall volume, shape, and natural folds.

By simulating the cloth directly over the supporting elements, I was able to quickly achieve more believable draping and weight in the fabric.

The smaller tent, where the fabric is tightly held by ropes, required a slightly more advanced approach.

After importing the blockout and simulating the cloth, I created cutouts where the ropes would pass through. To achieve a convincing sense of tension in the fabric, I used temporary collision meshes during the simulation to pull and stretch the cloth in the areas that were tied tightly with ropes. After the simulation, I replaced the placeholder collision objects with the rope meshes created using the same workflow as for the shark and octopus.

Presentation

I decided to present the environment from the perspective of a boat traveller to make the scene feel more immersive and lived-in.

This approach also made the project more challenging, as the composition and asset placement had to work with the path of the boat while highlighting the main elements of the scene. I had to make sure that the boat could realistically pass through the environment while guiding the viewer’s attention towards the key areas.

It influenced and made the project harder since the composition and placement of the assets in the scene needed to be accurate and realistic while also allowing a boat to pass through and highlight the main elements.

Lighting played a major role in directing the viewer's eye, especially in areas where many elements were framed together.

Unreal Engine Setup and Addons

For the scene’s lighting and atmosphere, I chose a rainy mood to reinforce the abandoned and decayed feeling of the environment.

Ultra Dynamic Sky was very useful for creating the rain weather effects, including rainfall, water droplets on surfaces, and additional material wetness. This helped add puddles and subtle interactions between the rain and certain meshes, such as water droplets falling from the fabric roofs of the tents, using the spline tool.

I also used EasyFog and UltraVolumetrics to add depth and atmosphere to the scene. The fog helped soften distant elements and also separate the foreground, midground, and background.

Some of the progress shots show the process of creating the desired mood of the environment.

Cristian Iurasciuc, 3D Environmental Artist

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