How to Create a Vintage-Look Cozy House Inspired by Alan Wake 2 Style & Mood

Introduction

Hi! I am Anton Mishchenko, a 3D Environment Artist from Kyiv, Ukraine. Since early childhood, I've been fond of drawing and dreaming of becoming a professional artist. In 2019, after graduating from university, I got my first full-time job as a 2D Prop Artist on a mobile game project. After a few months of drawing 2D props and icons, fellow artists encouraged me to try and learn Blender to speed up my 2D workflow. That was the point where my 3D journey started.

The transition from 2D to 3D media wasn't easy, and I owe a lot to Alex Boitsun, who encouraged me to try environment art and provided tons of useful tutorials, add-ons, and tips in the early stages, making the learning curve really smooth. When I started to feel more comfortable in 3D, it captivated me so much that I realized it was time to move on and switch to 3D Environment Art completely.

Getting started: ANEMOIA

I was inspired to create a vintage-style environment when I saw The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me — Let's Play. Although I didn't want to adopt that horror atmosphere, the style and setting resonated with me a lot. I decided to create a small hotel corridor scene for my portfolio, which soon transformed into a full-scale house interior with a flexible modular system.

To start and create something original and not just a copy of an environment produced by other artists, I needed to gather references. For the whole project, including props, foliage, lighting, and composition, I've gathered more than 2400 reference images. Most of those references came from Pinterest, some from ArtStation, and others from movies, TV series, and games. I've screenshotted everything relevant and potentially could help in the creative process.

Blockout & Composition

The initial blockout was fairly simple: a long corridor with pictures on the walls and some props scattered along the way. As soon as it was done, it felt like it was just not enough. The environment was expanded with a living room and staircase added, which significantly increased the amount of work but allowed to bring interesting compositional decisions and storytelling.

Once the blockout was finished, I set up cinematic cameras in Unreal Engine to define the main points of interest and compile a list of required modules and props needed to bring the scene to life.

Assets Production Approach

All the modeling was done in Blender. First of all, I've defined key metrics for modules and checked that the pivot was set in the same spot on every module for easy grid and vertex snapping. I wanted the modular system to be flexible and simple in case I wanted to use it in different scenarios or build even more rooms of various sizes. The base modular set included a few base walls with different lengths from 1 to 3 meters, angular walls, floor and ceiling tiles, pillars and stairs. With that library, it was easy to build the interior part in Unreal and move on to creating props.

Since the project setting was defined early and references were collected beforehand, I already had a collection of props and furniture images from the beginning of the XX century to choose from. The highlights of the scene were meant to be Chesterfield sofas and chairs, not only because they looked authentic but also because their shiny leather surface created a nice contrast between wood and wallpaper.

Even though I've tried to keep the props amount reasonable, it took a lot of time to produce every object from scratch. It was especially fun to work on leather surfaces, to investigate its structure, layering and damages that form during utilization. While modeling any piece of furniture, I highly recommend diving into how it's produced in real life. It'll be useful to know how the wooden frame is done, how leather or fabric is tucked and dyed, and how all the elements are assembled to form a piece of furniture that serves its purpose. In other words, if you want to create a chair — think like a chair.

Lowpoly & UVing

For props production, I've used the subdivision modeling technique. That way, I created both low poly and high poly in one mesh with further adjustments if needed. The plan was simple: I created a prop with a Subdivision modifier set to 2 or 3 in Blender, imported it into ZBrush (GoZ add-on is a lifesaver), sculpted it out, and brought back finished high poly to Blender. For low poly, I've just removed the Subdivision modifier from the original mesh and adjusted the wire as needed. This approach saved a lot of time since I didn't have to retopologize anything manually.

UVing was pretty straightforward, following base unwrapping rules for clean bakes and nice shading. While using Blender, though, it's impossible for me to imagine unwrapping without UVPackmaster, UV Toolkit, and Texel Density add-ons.

Texturing

Texturing was my favorite part. It's the time when everything in the scene comes to life and gains its history, contributing to storytelling in general.

First of all, I've created tileable materials in Substance 3D Designer to use on modular pieces. Each of these base materials had three variations of weariness that were blended later in Unreal either via vertex paint or second UV channel RGB masks.

Stained glass creation was a bit of a challenge. I've relied on the workflow described by incredible Material Artist Jonathan Benainous on his ArtStation page.

The pattern in the middle of the window was drawn by hand in Photoshop, and three bitmaps were exported to create color, height, and metalness base nodes for Designer.

While texturing props, I've tried to create a feeling of them being in use for years, but not to the condition when they would look neglected or nearly falling apart. It's always hard to create an interesting prop with good inner composition while keeping it relatively clean or undamaged. To overcome this problem, I've tried to create enough variation in Diffuse and Roughness in the early texturing stages, and only then added various imperfections, stains, dirt, or dust. In some cases, I've used Compare Mask in Painter to transform information from height channel to roughness and make variation even more intense. It was especially helpful while working with wooden surfaces.

To bring interest into tea set, vases, books, and carpets, I've found free alphas and patterns created by other artists. They helped to design authentic look for those little props and created a solid base for me to work on.

Another interesting part of the texturing stage was the laces creation process. All the lacing was created in Substance 3D Designer using this Quick Tip video from the official Substance YouTube channel. As soon as you set up the graph and have some good alpha patterns, it's extremely easy to iterate and create a variety of lacing by just replacing your pattern at the beginning of the graph.

Composition & Lighting

The composition and lighting in the scene were influenced by the amazing Alan Wake 2 and movies such as Joker and Longlegs. I've taken those references as a base while trying not to make the atmosphere in my project disturbing or horror-ish but cozy and warm. For that purpose, I've used artificial light sources that emitted warm, dim light.
 
All the lamps were created to support the composition and weren't placed randomly. Each lamp served its purpose: some were needed to highlight important areas, some to create a visual frame around the objects, some to keep visual balance and avoid blank or dark spots, and some to guide the eye towards the focal point.

Rendering & Post-Production

Even though the scene looked good in the viewport with Lumen, I've decided to go further and render separate frames using Unreal's Path Tracer. It brought the atmosphere to another level, with all the tiny shadows and reflections traced. Though Path Tracer produced grainy images, I decided not to denoise them, as it contributed to the vintage look I was looking for. Another creative decision that helped to add a cinematic feel to the scene is to set the camera aspect ratio to 2.33, one of the standard movie formats.

The next important stage was color correction. For that, I took raw renders in EXR format to Photoshop for advanced color grading. There, I had full control over the colors and was able to give the scene the desired cinematic look. Color correction was really simple. I added some yellows to highlights and blues to shadows, highlighted all the reds, and adjusted contrast and exposure. After all the adjustments were made, a color LUT was created and imported into the Post-Process volume.

Summary

Overall, it was a great journey. I've learned a lot about Unreal's shaders, advanced texturing workflows, fabrics, and embroidery creation processes, and leveled up my environment art skills in every aspect.

It took a year to finalize the environment. I've been working on it aside from a full-time job, spending free evenings and sometimes weekends. There were times when I had no energy left, the project looked like crap, and it was hard to continue the work. I suppose a lot of artists are facing this issue, and I would suggest stepping away for some time and focusing on anything that is not related to 3D. After coming back from a break, it won't feel that bad anymore, and you'll either find a solution for the creative issues or just won't see any issues at all. Sometimes it's like a boss in Souls games you cannot defeat. Just come later and try again until it's done.

Thank you for reading, and thanks to 80 Level for this interview! I hope it was fun to read and that it provided some valuable insights for everyone curious about 3D art.

Anton Mishchenko, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford