Creating a Painterly-Like and Stylized Environment Inspired by Howl's Moving Castle

Introduction

Hi! My name is Frankie, an Argentinian 3D Artist and Game Developer currently based in Barcelona, Spain. Video games have been my passion since childhood, and I've always been driven by the dream of creating them myself.

Last year, I released my first game, Sands of Hope, developed in Unity, where I was responsible for most of the art production. After that experience, I decided to focus on improving my environment art skills and expanding my portfolio. Stylized environments are the area that excites me the most, so I began exploring new tools and workflows.

This project became my first full environment created in Unreal Engine 5 and Substance 3D Designer, inspired by a scene of Howl's Moving Castle.

Howl's Cottage – Choosing the Scene & Gathering References

In my previous game, I was responsible for defining the art direction. For this project, however, I chose to recreate an existing scene instead of developing an original concept. I wanted to challenge myself with a workflow closer to a production environment, where artists frequently work from established references or concept art.

What attracted me the most to this scene was its clear visual composition. The cottage acts as the hero element, while the surrounding landscape, full of flowers and vegetation, frames the house and reinforces the calm, magical atmosphere of the setting.

One of the strongest inspirations came from the work of Environment Artist Adrian Drott, especially his Howl's Garden scene, which motivated me to attempt a similar type of project and aim for a comparable level of visual storytelling. During the reference phase, I collected screenshots from the film along with additional stylized environment references that aim for a Ghibli aesthetic, like this one from Ana Cristina Pacheco. These helped me analyze shapes, lighting, color palette, and overall mood that I wanted to reproduce. 

Early Blockout & Landscape Sculpting

The first step was creating a simple blockout to define the composition and scale of the environment. I started by placing a few primitive cubes in the scene to mark the approximate position and size of the cottage. Once the basic layout felt correct, I began sculpting the landscape directly inside Unreal Engine using terrain tools.

Because the original movie shot has a very strong cinematic framing, I decided to keep the camera angle mostly fixed throughout the entire project. This approach allowed me to constantly evaluate the scene from the final perspective and ensure that the composition remained balanced.

While sculpting the terrain, I added small variations in elevation and created a few depressions that would later be used for water elements. Even at this early stage, I tried to think about how the landscape could guide the viewer's eye toward the cottage.

Stylized Textures in Substance 3D Designer

One of the biggest learning experiences during this project was working with Substance 3D Designer for the first time. Initially, I planned to combine Substance 3D Designer and Substance 3D Painter, using Designer mainly for landscape materials and Painter for the hero asset.

However, as I already have experience working with Painter, I decided to build all the materials procedurally in Designer. This workflow allowed me to experiment with reusable materials that could be applied across multiple assets, which allowed me to practice in a real-time environment production workflow.

When designing the materials, I focused on maintaining a stylized visual language, which is why, instead of relying on heavy micro-detailing, I emphasized large and medium shapes. This video about material fundamentals (by JP Levels) in Designer was a huge help in understanding the importance of keeping the textures readable and visually appealing at a distance.

Another important element was achieving a subtle painterly look inspired by animated films and stylized games. To achieve this, I created a secondary material effect that adds a soft brushstroke-like pattern across the textures, helping unify the visual style of the environment. I would also like to thank Justin Wallace, whose tutorials were incredibly helpful while learning Substance 3D Designer during this project

Material Insights

Once the textures were ready, the next step was building the material system inside Unreal Engine to enable vertex painting. I created a three-layer blending material that allowed multiple textures to blend across a surface.

In addition to that, I created a Material Function to add subtle color variation in world space, which makes the variation stay consistent across meshes and helps break up tiling on large surfaces.

Before moving forward with detailed asset creation, I also applied some of the base materials created in Substance 3D Designer and implemented a simple grass material. Since vegetation and terrain are such important elements in this scene, establishing them early helped me better understand how the final environment would feel visually.

To achieve the painterly aesthetic, I started by adjusting the normals of the grass blades so they point upward. This technique softens the shading and allows the lighting to behave more like a painted surface, avoiding the harsh contrast that usually appears in realistic grass materials.

After placing the first grass pass in the scene, I noticed the result looked a bit too uniform and visually flat. To break that repetition,  I firstly blended the grass with the landscape color through Runtime Virtual Textures (RVT), allowing the foliage to inherit subtle color shifts from the terrain. On top of that, I added a mask that acts like a wind noise texture, creating the illusion that there's a wind burst shadow, even if there's no movement yet.

Finally, I implemented a simple wind animation using noise-driven vertex offsets. This adds gentle motion to the grass and helps the environment feel more alive without becoming visually distracting.

Lighting and Atmosphere

Lighting was crucial for establishing the mood of the scene. Since the cottage acts as the focal point, the lighting was designed to gently guide the viewer's attention toward it while maintaining a soft and natural atmosphere throughout the environment. I used a warm directional light to simulate mid-afternoon sunlight, which reinforces the cozy feeling of the scene.

This warm tone also contrasts nicely with the cooler colors of the distant mountains and sky. The skybox was carefully adjusted to match the lighting conditions, and I added cloud cards with a simple material to bring more life to the sky without distracting from the main focal point.

To create atmospheric depth, I used exponential height fog to soften background elements and reused the cloud cards I made for the skybox as fog cards to introduce a subtle sense of distance between the foreground and the landscape.

To do that, I just changed the color, opacity, and movement speed of a duplicated MI_Clouds, sometimes reusing it's the best and most efficient option! Finally, subtle post-processing adjustments were used to fine-tune the colors, slightly increase contrast, and unify the overall look of the scene.

Details and Polish

During the final stage of the project, I focused on adding small details that would make the environment feel more alive. Several subtle visual effects were added to simulate natural movement in the environment, such as smoke, floating dust particles around the cottage, and mainly a wind VFX scattered around the scene, which helped reinforce the sense of life in the environment, apart from the fog cards previously mentioned. I’d like to thank both Gabriel Aguilar and Rimaye for their tutorials, which helped me in this section.

Another key element that contributed to the final composition was the water shader used in the small ponds. Even though the shader remains relatively simple, it adds visual variety to the terrain and helps balance the scene and get that reference similarity.

Finally, I spent time carefully placing foliage elements across the landscape. Adjusting the density and distribution of vegetation clusters wasn't as easy as I thought at the beginning. As foliage plays an important role in the reference image, it was crucial to try to replicate how flowers and grass patches were painted in Studio Ghibli movies. Rather than placing big chunks of randomly selected foliage, I preferred selecting one by one and placing them in small groups separated by their colors, which helped create a more organic and believable environment.

Conclusion

This project was an incredibly valuable learning experience. It allowed me to improve several aspects of my environment art workflow while also becoming familiar with new tools. Working with Substance 3D Designer and exploring Unreal Engine's material system were two of the most rewarding parts of the process. I also gained a much better understanding of how vertex blending and reusable materials can help add variation and flexibility to stylized environments.

For future projects, I would like to expand on the techniques explored here while also incorporating new workflows, such as sculpting, to bring additional personality and detail to my environments. You can check out my X and ArtStation profiles to stay tuned!

I would like to thank the team at 80 Level for allowing me to share my work, especially Gloria Levine, for helping make this article possible. I hope that some of the insights from this project can be useful for other artists who are beginning their journey in environment art. Thank you very much for reading.

Frankie Povarchik, 3D Environment Artist

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