How to Design an Environment Mixing Coziness with Cyberpunk Vibes

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Göktuğ Yılmaz, and I'm an Environment Artist. I've been playing games since before I could even form long-term memories, and I always thought about how fun it would be to work in a game studio. But without any studios around me or examples in my country, it felt like wanting to be an astronaut, so I didn't even try to chase it.

I discovered 3D modeling while studying Civil Engineering at university, and realized that some of the same software is used in game development. Learning that actual game studios are becoming popular in my country, too, made me realize that I could actually work in this industry. I taught myself and transitioned right after graduating.

I worked at a mobile game studio for nearly two years and contributed to over 60 games. To meet bigger studios and learn their workflows, I enrolled at Futuregames in Sweden. I'm now close to graduation, excited about the future, and hoping to find the right place for me.

Fabricator's Apartment

For my specialization project, I needed to start a new scene. My portfolio mostly consists of medieval outdoor environments, so this time I wanted to go in the opposite direction and create an indoor, futuristic, cyberpunk-style environment to show that I have range.

I researched a lot of references, but unfortunately, I couldn't find a concept that fully matched what I had in mind. So instead, I selected three or four concepts that I really liked and combined elements from them. I believe this workflow has its ups and downs. If you don't stay strict to a single reference, you have more creative freedom, but if you are not careful with the areas you change, you might make the scene worse or get stuck not knowing what would fit.

I actually have many unfinished scenes where I ended up getting stuck like this. On the other hand, if you focus on recreating something one-to-one, you don't need to worry as much about new ideas and can just focus on quality, but you have less artistic freedom. It's a lot of trial and error.

Of course, telling a story with the environment is the fun part. The story in this scene is about someone living in a small apartment, with 3D-printing revolvers, pistols, and selling them. To support this idea, I placed many small props such as weapon parts, crates with finished revolvers, boxes of bullets, and similar details.

Composition & Blockout

I always start my scenes by placing the camera and building the environment using cubes or very basic models. For the hero asset in the middle of the room, I initially thought about having a robot being built, since a human figure is very good at attracting attention. However, I received feedback that in a real studio pipeline, a character artist would most likely be responsible for creating that model, so I switched to something more fitting for an environment artist: hard-surface robotic arms.

Of course, I still supported the hero asset with composition, lighting, and contrast. Using a modular workflow for creating the room is almost a must. In most projects, you'll likely need to keep updating your walls or floor pieces, so reimporting a 2-meter wall module and having every wall update automatically makes things much easier. It also helps a lot when adjusting the room shape for better composition, since changing the layout in the engine can take just a few minutes.

Modeling the Robotic Arms

For my hero asset, the robotic arm, I started modeling in Blender and added a lot of detail using the BoxCutter and Hard Ops addons, which are great because of their non-destructive workflow. Instead of fully retopologizing the model, I applied the modifiers and then cleaned up the topology. The whole arm ended up being around 30k tris, which is very acceptable for a hero asset.
I created two different tips for the arm: one is a drill, and the other is a grabber.

The tip parts are separate, so I can easily swap or reposition them. The whole idea behind the arms was to create a futuristic 3D printer. At first, the arms were rigged, and it was easy to move them using inverse kinematics. However, I made a mistake while decorating the arm with cables. I placed the cables over the joints.

This meant that if I wanted to animate the arms, I would also need to rig the cables, which would add extra work. Because of that, I decided to scrap the rigging idea. It was a small bummer for me, but also a good learning moment and something I’ll be more careful about in future projects.

Texturing

For my previous project, I used a very basic RGB mask setup, but for this one, I went with a more complex, RGB-heavy workflow. For those who are not very familiar with RGB masks, each mesh uses two UV maps. The first UV map is for the RGB mask and has a much lower texel density, while the second UV map is used for tileable textures with a defined texel density for the project, which was around 10–12 px/cm.

I created the RGB masks in Substance 3D Painter, adding details such as metal edge wear, subtle dust, and AO. Turning this into a smart material and making adjustments later helped speed up the whole process. In Unreal Engine, the material uses the first UV map to apply the RGB mask details to the mesh, while the second UV map is used for the tileable textures. This results in a very optimized mesh while still maintaining a high level of visual detail.

Another big game-changer for me was using normal decals everywhere I could. It's not really a secret technique or anything special, but the difference they make on hard-surface assets still amazes me.

Lighting & Rendering

Lighting a closed environment is unexpectedly different from outdoor scenes. Since directional lights, skylights, and HDRIs don't affect the scene as much, you have to rely more on spotlights, rect lights, and point lights, which can become performance-heavy if you use too many of them.

It's also more difficult to balance everything in a cyberpunk-style scene, since there are so many objects that emit light, like screens and neon elements. I usually start with the biggest light sources in the scene, which in this case were the ceiling lights and the monitors. I increased their indirect lighting until the light bounced around the room and filled the very dark areas.

Completely pitch-black spots can disrupt the contrast, so I try to avoid them. For areas where the light couldn't reach properly, I added extra spotlights to illuminate those parts specifically. I also used a bit of fog to reduce the black areas and bring more depth into the scene.

Additionally, to draw more attention to the main hero asset, I placed extra lights around it to create a rim light so its silhouette is easier to read.

After rendering, I went into DaVinci Resolve and worked on some post-processing.

Here are the color values in the end:

Conclusion

This whole project took around three months to finish. Combining multiple concept arts into one and making RGB mask-based assets look as good as traditionally textured models in Substance 3D Painter was definitely challenging. If you are learning, I would recommend sticking to a single concept.

Even though the whole project was quite demanding, I'm happy that I chose to do it. It was a lot of fun, especially the hard-surface parts. Thanks so much to 80 Level for featuring me, and I hope you liked my scene. There is still so much to learn and practice. Hopefully, see you again in another project.

Göktuğ Yılmaz, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins