How to Make Ghibli-Inspired Tower-Turned-Hotel using Substance 3D

Introduction 

Hi, I’m Rodrigo Costa, Senior 3D Environment Artist at Gameloft Barcelona. I’m originally from Brazil and first got into game art as a teenager, creating Flight Simulator 98 skins, GTA 1 cars, and Quake 2 mods by learning from forums like Polycount, IRC communities, and participating in these community contests.

In 2004, during my first year of Graphic Design, I landed an internship at a small local studio after showing up at their door every day until they gave me a chance. The studio grew from 12 to over 130 people, and over seven years, I went from a self-taught intern to Lead 3D Artist, working on Taikodom, a sci-fi MMO that was, at the time, the largest Unity project in Latin America.

For many years, I worked as a 3D generalist and even thought about becoming a character artist. In 2013, I moved to China to work on a first-person mobile shooter, contributing both character and environment assets. But over time, I realized that environment art was where I felt most inspired. Later, while developing my indie game Arena Gods, I had to wear every possible art hat, which confirmed my need to specialize. Around 2018, I decided to fully dedicate myself to environment art, and I’ve never looked back.

That decision eventually led me to Gameloft Barcelona in 2021, where I landed my first dedicated environment artist role. Since then, I’ve had the chance to work on several Disney IPs, including Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas content for Disney Speedstorm. I’m now working on an unreleased Dungeons & Dragons survival-craft RPG.

Repurposed Old Tower

The first time I saw Alariko’s concept, I was stunned. It immediately reminded me of Pazu’s home and village from Laputa: Castle in the Sky, one of my all-time favorite films. I have grown to really admire Alariko’s work because it often carries a touch of Catalan modernism. Since I started living in Barcelona, that style catches my eye everywhere I go.

My goal was to create a stylized scene while leaning the materials toward realism, aiming for a fresh take on stylization and avoiding overused techniques in stylized works like heavy edge highlights.

For references, I leaned a lot on my own surroundings and, of course, Studio Ghibli. Many of the textures, shapes, and details came from photos I took while strolling through my neighborhood with my daughter. That mix of personal observation and the original concept gave me a strong foundation for the project.

Blockout

My workflow here is very straightforward, and I consider this stage the most critical. I start by placing the concept art on a plane that faces the camera, then I match the camera angle and focal length as closely as possible. To fine-tune the match, I animate the material opacity of that plane from 100 percent at frame 0 to 0 percent at frame 100, so I can scrub the timeline and fade the overlay in and out while I search for the exact position.

While dialing in the camera, I begin blocking the major landmarks. For this scene, that meant simple primitives like walls and a cylinder for the tower. Once the alignment feels right, I lock the camera for good and continue refining the blockout from big to small, focusing on clear silhouettes and proportions before touching any details.

I never rush this part. Spending extra time here saves a lot of rework later.

Modeling

I used different approaches depending on the asset. Even as it's a personal project, I didn’t go into extreme Nanite-level polycounts, but I also didn’t make everything fully tileable. The full set of buildings is around 200,000 triangles, which felt like a good middle ground.

For key pieces like the tower roof and main house walls, I treated them as hero assets and sculpted them in ZBrush almost as if they were for a 3D print. For modular parts like windows, doors, and garage props, I created small kits and organized them into texture atlases. This workflow kept the scene efficient without losing the handcrafted look I wanted.

In ZBrush, I mostly used trim smooth borders with a square alpha, sometimes it's too strong, and I end up using only trim dynamic. 95% of the time I'm using trim dynamic, smooth directional, and move tools.

For retopology, I relied heavily on the retopology tools in 3ds Max, which I’m a huge fan of. For UVs, I used TexTools, mostly for the feature that creates smoothing groups based on UV islands. This is the only way I can bake perfect normals all the time.

Texturing

I started by breaking the scene and found four main material types: stone wall, plaster, wood, and painted wood. I built these in Substance 3D Designer, either to use directly in Unreal Engine or as base materials in Substance 3D Painter. For example, the painted wood worked both as a tileable material and as a base to paint over in Substance 3D Painter.

The stone wall was a special case. I modeled it in ZBrush, exported a height map, and refined it in Substance 3D Designer. Since I am still fairly new to it, Dannie Carlone’s tutorials were really helpful in guiding that workflow.

In Unreal Engine 5, I experimented with a new approach: combining Nanite tessellation with vertex painting and Height Lerp to blend the stone wall texture with moss and plaster on the tower. It was tempting to push the displacement strength higher because the tessellation looks so satisfying, but I kept it closer to the concept for consistency.

Another satisfying system I worked on for the first time is the decal system. I ended up using decals all over the top of the tower to add some moisture and drips.

Final Scene

My main goal was to keep the composition as close to the concept as possible, even matching the image aspect ratio. At the same time, I allowed myself some artistic freedom to guide the eye using subtle cues such as foliage placement, cloud positioning, and shadow direction, treating the composition almost like a painter would.

Another important aspect of the scene that plays a big role in the composition is the clouds; something I wanted to check in UE5 prior to starting this project was VDB clouds. I ended up using clouds from a free library before I made an attempt to hand-model the clouds in ZBrush and turn them into VDBs using tyFlow, but to achieve a desirable result would imply months of work.

To achieve the desired stylized look, I did some research and created a custom material with density and emission strength. For those adventuring into VDBs, my tip would be to use this console command to enable indirect lights; it took me a while to find this: r.HeterogeneousVolumes.IndirectLighting 1.

Lighting & Rendering

At first glance, the lighting looked like a simple daylight setup, but the more I studied the concept, the more I noticed subtle nuances. There was a warm light hitting the tower, an overall overcast mood, shifting cloud shadows, and the sun blooming through the overhead dark cloud.

I started by dialing in the sunlight position and intensity, then adjusted ambient occlusion so it would not feel too strong. Since the main building faces the camera in shadow, the challenge was to modulate those shadows. I approached it like a painter, placing extra points and directional lights to reduce shadow intensity and to reveal shapes that were getting lost. I also added small point lights to highlight landmarks that stood out more in the concept, such as the midsection of the tower and the main house wall near the “hostel” sign.

UE5’s Sequencer was key to presenting the project. It was my first time using it, and I found it surprisingly simple and intuitive. At first, I considered baking all the sheep animations, but in the end, it was much easier to control them directly in the Sequencer.

For the cloud shadows, I followed a tutorial and created a light function attached to the camera. For the blooming effect in the sky, I used a simple billboard with an additive blurry circle. These small tricks made a big difference in achieving the final mood.

Conclusion 

The project took about six and a half months to complete, usually in time boxes ranging from 30 minutes to three hours. The biggest challenge was balancing it with a full-time job, family life, and staying healthy. I had never fully committed to such a complex personal project in over 20 years of working in 3D, but becoming a new parent actually gave me the structure I needed. By going to bed early, I found I could wake up at 4 AM, work until 7, and still start the day fresh. That quiet morning window became the most productive and inspiring part of my routine.

The main lesson I took away was the importance of time management and planning. When you are tight on time, you need to define clear goals, time-box activities, and execute with intent. I would go to bed knowing exactly what I was going to work on the next morning, and that made the process much more focused.

For translating a 2D concept into 3D, my advice is to put extra care into the blockout stage and not be afraid of big changes. If something feels off in the angle or proportion, it probably is, and it is always better to fix it early rather than let small issues pile up.

What I enjoyed the most was working on the textures, since I am becoming increasingly interested in material art. For tutorials, I highly recommend Thiago Klafke’s Substance 3D Designer for Stylized Environments, which helped me a lot when I was still green in Designer. For the Nanite tessellation blend workflow, I would also suggest Hoj Dee’s YouTube channel.

Finding time for personal projects is never easy, but with the right routine and focus, it can become the most rewarding part of your day. For me, those quiet early mornings turned into the space where I grew the most as an artist.

Rodrigo Costa, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford