How To Create Stylized Capybara Fountain Diorama In 3D

Introduction

Hello! My name is Alice Andrieu, and I'm a French 3D Environment Artist at Douze Dixièmes studio, where I contributed to the development of the game MIO: Memories in Orbit. I finished my studies in 2024.

I've always loved creating and trying different artistic mediums, and gaming has always been a huge part of my life. When I realized I could turn both into a career, I gave it a shot and discovered 3D! Specializing in environments was natural for me, as I've always been drawn to architecture and photography.

The Capybara Fountain Diorama Project

This project idea was born in 2024 during my final year of school. However, between classes and my apprenticeship, I didn't have enough free time to work on it. Once I started my job, I wanted to get back to personal projects to keep creating fun ideas during my free time, while exploring new techniques. Taking this break actually helped me rethink the project, giving it a fresh direction with new ideas.

The idea for this diorama originally came from a board of project ideas I have. One of them was to create a fountain but I wanted to add a little fun twist to it, and another idea was to create a capybara statue. I found it funny to merge these together and I started planning the project.

Before starting any project, I like to set up clear goals, and for this project, I wanted to:

• Sculpt and texture on a small-scale project;
• Create my own concept;
• Have fun.

I gathered references in a PureRef board, focusing first on capybaras and fountain shapes. I wanted to stylize the capybara shapes and found inspiration in real animal statues balancing roundness and hard edges. Animal stylization also gave me inspiration for the capybara's pose.

Blockout

I first created a rough blockout in Blender, used to define the first shapes. I then moved to Photoshop to explore ground patterns with quick sketches.

These sketches helped me refine the blockout, which I used as a base to roughly sketch the overall fountain design and colors back in Photoshop. This concept gave me clear directions for the next steps of production.

Sculpting

I brought my blockout into ZBrush and started the sculpting phase with the capybara statue first, since it's the main focus of this piece. While it was the most fun part of this project, it was also quite challenging to balance recognizable capybara features with stylized shapes and hard edges. I spent a lot of time iterating in the early stages, trying to find the right spots to emphasize. Clay Buildup, Dam Standard, and Pinch were my go-to brushes for this part. Once done, I moved on to the detailing phase and broke the edges with Trim dynamic and added a few cracks and surface details with Orb Brushes.

I realized later on that the capybara's face was missing something, so I decided to add a subtle jawline to better define the head's shape.

For the fountain rocks, to save time and texture space, I sculpted only half the ground and the base, then duplicated the geometry later to create the full mesh. The center part is a unique piece. The workflow was pretty straightforward: I trimmed the edges with Trim dynamic and Trim smooth border brushes, and used Orb brushes for cracks/surface variation/flattening some trimmed edge.

I also sculpted a trim part for the tiling pattern on the base. This was baked onto a plane to create a half-trim texture later used in the final model.

The dirt ground was the last element I tackled in terms of design. I originally wanted to create a procedural material, but I quickly realized that it would serve the design better if I created a custom sculpted shape. I used Blender's annotation tool to quickly sketch the shapes, then used it as a guide to block out and sculpt them.

Foliage

For the foliage, I used Photoshop to create a mask texture that I translated into 3D cards to create different variations of grass clumps, flowers, and moss clumps. I had texture space left, so I also added the clementines' UVs to it. I created the base color for all these elements in Substance 3D Painter.

I wanted to give a fuzzy look to the moss. I used the built-in Scatter tool in Blender to place the moss clumps on top of a base mesh, then turned all the normals upwards to avoid lighting artifacts.

Unwrap & Baking

I retopologized everything in Blender and made several quick baking tests in Marmoset Toolbag to check how the sculpt would transfer onto the low-poly mesh. I added a few extra edge loops where needed to preserve the roundness of some shapes. Once satisfied, I cleaned up my UVs and ensured the texel density was even. I baked the AO, Curvature, and Normal map in Marmoset Toolbag and the rest in Substance 3D Painter.

The fountain uses a total of four texture maps. I used a half-trim texture for the fountain base and a rectangle texture with a bit of empty texture space in case of potential new additional rocks, which ended up not being used.

Texturing

For the texturing, I wanted to have a painted effect while relying mostly on generators and masks inside Substance 3D Painter. I took advantage of the baked maps to create quick masks for curvature, AO, and more.

I started by creating a base material with a few grunge masks, generators, and added a stylized touch with Blur slope and Warp filters using custom noises to give this stylized painterly effect. I used this base material for every part of the fountain and then tweaked the parameters to my liking. One thing I quickly realized was to add small color variations between the different fountain parts' rocks. This helped avoid visual monotony and spotlight the capybara.

To break up the procedural feel of the different layers a bit, I added subtle smudge brush strokes following this fantastic tip shared by Nikkie Monteleone.

Finally, I used the Baked Stylized Lighting filter to highlight the most important parts and have soft baked-in shadows.

Rendering

The water shader is using the Simple Layer Water Material as a base. I combined techniques from different tutorials, from Captain Raymond for the basic water setup with normals and refraction, and from Rimaye to add the shoreline noise:

To bring dynamism to the small waterfalls, I created different VFXs, including:

• Foam meshes placed at the start and end of each cascade, animated with World Position Offset with a simple noise;
• A Niagara system, spawning water droplets and small white spheres for the splash effect;
• A mesh decal effect simulating water waves with normal map, roughness, and specular parameters.

I placed the main camera early on after importing my first blockout. This helped me spend more time on details people would actually see. It was also super useful to see the progress made throughout the entire production with only one static camera as a reference view. Close-up cameras were placed later on.

To draw more attention to the capybara and reduce visual distortion, I slightly decreased the camera's field of view.

I used several tricks to light this piece and emphasize the capybara, such as fake tree shadows with a basic World Position Offset setup, to add a bit of environmental context and dynamic lighting:

A light function on the Directional Light to simulate cloud shadows:

Various Point and Spot lights to brighten dark areas:

To quickly check if the lighting spotlighted the capybara well, instead of taking screenshots into Photoshop, I duplicated my main camera and put its saturation value down. This helped save time with positioning the fake shadows and tweaking the intensity of the different lights while keeping an eye on the values.

Finally, I adjusted a few parameters in the post process to boost colors and contrast. The most important one was the sharpen, which improved the overall definition of shapes and edges, as the original render from the main camera was slightly blurry without it.

Conclusion

The main challenge was to come up with a fresh idea and to iterate on my own design; I was questioning a lot. It was helpful to take some time off, touch some grass, and come back with a pair of fresh eyes. I also asked for feedback when needed: I'd like to give a special thanks to Lionel Leboulanger and Solenn Ripoteau, who were extremely helpful and encouraging! They helped me push the details further and notice things I had missed.

A huge source of motivation for me was to keep track of the progress by taking screenshots regularly. I would recommend doing that for any project! This also helps to identify what works and what doesn't between several iterations.

While the design process was a challenge, I definitely enjoyed working on this piece and discovering techniques I had never used before. I recommend always keeping learning with articles, tutorials, and art communities, to learn a few tricks that might be helpful one day!

Thanks for reading!

Alice Andrieu, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford