How to Make Cozy Wooden 3D House with Blender

Introduction 

Hello there! My name is Yuriy Vlasiuk, and I’m a 3D Environment Artist. I’ve been working in the industry for a little over 3 years. In this article, I’d like to walk you through the process of recreating a Japanese doll shop based on an amazing concept by G xy. I’ll cover my workflow from reference gathering to final rendering in Unreal Engine 5.

Goat House

Let me start with the concept I chose for this project. I decided not to create a full environment, because I wanted to keep the focus on the building and everything related to it, without spending too much time on surrounding props or terrain. I also wanted to find a complex and interesting design that would allow me to show an unusual shape and interesting proportions, as well as to have a chance to do some sculpting and texturing with masks. I chose the concept by G xy. I want to thank them for such a great piece – it’s full of interesting details.

Then came an important but not too long step – collecting references for the elements of the house. I cleaned up the board a little and left only the most useful references that I relied on during my work.

One of the first and most important things to decide is the visual style of the project. I knew from the start that I wanted something close to the style of games like Assassin’s Creed or Baldur’s Gate 3. In other words, I wanted to create a house that would fit naturally in those kinds of worlds. That’s why the final result looks more realistic than the stylized concept.

Blocking

The second most important step was blocking and getting the proportions right. The house has a very complex shape, with almost no clear straight lines. Also, there is no environment around it to help understand the perspective. So I started by drawing perspective lines and loading that shot into a program called fSpy.

This very useful software helps you find the right camera angle and focal length and import the setup into Blender. These lines also help you visually understand the right angle, and it's easier to place the points in the program. The further you place the points, the more accurate the camera will be.

The next important step was building a basic blockout and projecting the reference onto it through the camera. This helps to better match both the house's size and the camera setup. I can say that a well-aligned blockout and camera will help avoid a lot of problems later on.

Then I started refining the blockout by modeling mid-level shapes. I recommend doing this with texture display enabled and the “correct face attributes” checkbox on.

After that, I began thinking about what exactly I would model and how. While studying the concept, I selected several wood and stone pieces from a small set that I could use to build the whole house.

Below you can see the set of wooden planks and stones.

Sculpting

Since sculpting wooden boards for a building is very different from sculpting a hero prop in terms of texel density and detail level, my main goal at this stage was not to go too deep into small details, which wouldn’t be visible even from 1–2 meters away. I chose references with strong, large, and medium-sized details.

I used a standard high-poly workflow. I loaded the prepared low-poly, added a few subdivision levels and with the help of DamStandard, TrimSmoothBorder and Morph, I created cracks and damage, then added simple wood surface noise – and that’s it.

I used the same logic to sculpt a few stones and bricks.

Mapping, Baking, Preparing for Texturing

Here’s how I planned it: in the first UV channel, I unwrapped a set of unique wood planks for baking and connected the normal map only.

In the second UV channel, I unwrapped the parts of the house by asset so I could texture them later using a mask-based pipeline in Substance 3D Painter.

Below is a photo showing an example of the house’s assets preparing for mask-based texturing.

Hay Roof

My main reference for creating the roof was the scene from the Quixel team – their Medieval Village Megascans Sample. Using Blender’s sculpting tools and the Dyntopo brush, I made a base shape similar to theirs. I unwrapped it and textured it in Quixel Mixer using a displacement map. Then I took hay cards and carefully placed them on the roof, first creating grouped segments for straight and corner parts. Of course, there was still a lot of manual work.

Landscape

To make the building feel more connected to the environment, I decided to create a simple landscape around the walls using lerp-based height blending, vertex painting, and Nanite tessellation. Videos from Hoj Dee's YouTube channel helped me a lot with writing the shader, so big thanks to him!

Props

All props were made using standard pipelines — I used mid-poly where it was enough, in some cases I had to sculpt and make full high-poly and low-poly models, and in a few places I got help from a great artist from ENTANGLED Studios – Anna Voskovskaya.

The shader setup was the most important and time-consuming part of the project. To fully achieve the result I wanted, I created a shader that supports mask-based texturing.

Composition

One of the most interesting topics I studied during this project was frame composition. There are many great videos and articles about it, and I think it’s only fair to mention Malte Resenberger Loosmann and his ArtStation article Art Direction: Mastering Foundations, which really helped me while working on this scene.

Here’s the structure I followed: the house is placed using the rule of thirds – it’s not in the center but a bit to the right, which makes the image feel more natural. The roof, beams, and facade details guide the viewer’s eye to the shop window, where you can find lots of interesting things like masks, signs, and props. The warm light nicely highlights the wood and contrasts with the cool sky and mountains. The composition is balanced – there’s a tower on the left, two extensions on the right, and together they hold the structure of the shot. I also added depth by adding mountains in the background.

Also, during this stage, it was very helpful to ask my friends to share their first thoughts when seeing the house for the first time – where their eyes go first, what they think, and what kind of house it looks like.

Lighting

The last but not least important stage, which I also really enjoyed, was setting up the lighting. The scene and camera stayed the same, but the biggest difference was in the mood and colors. I chose a classic pair of complementary colors – yellow and purple – and decided to experiment a bit. I was inspired by the works you can see here.

The main idea was to create a cold, almost mystical feeling outside, and a cozy, safe atmosphere inside the house. To achieve that, I used cold blue and purple tones for the background. The big moon adds a magical touch and balances the left side of the frame. Inside the shop, warm yellow-orange light immediately catches the eye and gives a feeling of comfort and life. All this together creates a sense of a magical night, like in a good animated movie.

All the lighting was set up using the Ultra Dynamic Sky addon. An important step when working with it is first balancing all shadows and contrast, so no color information is lost in the final render. Then I slowly started adjusting the intensity and sun angle to get the shadows I needed.

And finally, something that’s very important for an environment artist is matching the color direction. It’s about being able to create assets that look as close as possible to the visual style of a game concept.

Time Management

Working on a portfolio scene is hard and takes a lot of time. I often had to work on weekends and a few hours after or even before my main job. To keep the feeling of progress, I wrote down the hours and stages of my work in a notebook. Tracking time really helped me mentally – it gave me a clear picture of how much I had already done, and that motivated me to keep going. So if you find it hard to start your own project, I recommend tracking your time.

Here’s what I ended up with:

120 hours went into the main work – modeling, texturing, importing, and setting up materials in the engine. 40 hours – for color correction, texture tweaks, lighting, and rendering.

Conclusion

Working on this environment based on the concept by G xy helped me improve my artistic skills a lot. I got deep into learning about environment workflows and shaders.

Right now, I’m open to new job opportunities. I’d be very happy to join a studio where I can grow and work together with talented people who also love making games.

I want to thank the 80 Level team for the chance to share this project, and also everyone from the private UPScale Discord server – it’s full of amazing artists from different studios around the world. One day, I hope we’ll meet in real life!

If you liked the article, here are my links to LinkedIn and X, I will be glad to continue sharing my work there and stay in touch.

Yuriy Vlasiuk, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins