How to Model and Texture a Tavern Using Substance 3D Painter and Blender
Jonathan de Abreu shared how he created The Nocturn Note - Bar environment, detailing how he modeled and organized the assets, how he created the design of the floor, and talking about the retopology and texturing process.
Introduction
My first contact with 3D was in high school when I used SketchUp for a school project. Years later, I pursued a degree in 3D. I acquired my skills through extensive study, and YouTube tutorials have always helped me improve my knowledge. I have contributed to projects such as Night Fever, Flip Your Way, FTBL Experience, and others.
The Nocturn Note – Bar project
I had recently learned how to use Blender, but until then, I had only worked on small projects. When I chose Loanne's concept while browsing ArtStation, I decided to study it and began searching for references on stylized materials and lighting. From the beginning, I knew I wanted lighting as close as possible to the concept.
In the first few days, I didn't worry about finding exact references for stylized materials. The most important thing was to start blocking out the scene, define the camera, and begin lighting. After the blockout, I chose the roof to finalize the first model and to define the base materials of the environment.
The Composition
I opened the software and quickly blocked out the entire scene, adjusted the camera lens, and, by observing the silhouette of the objects, refined my blockout according to the concept. I defined the interior of the bar as the main focal point of my composition and, through lighting and modeling, created a visual hierarchy among the elements. Even after finishing all the elements from the concept, a friend advised me to add more details to the walls to complement what had already been created.
So, I added more assets to enhance the project. My workflow was simple. I separated the scene into assets, with the low-poly modeling done in Blender. I created edge details in ZBrush, extracted both the low-poly and high-poly from there, then returned to Blender, unwrapped the UVs, and textured everything in Substance 3D Painter. For repeating items, such as the beer mug, I modeled only one and instanced the rest to save render time.
For the wood and metal details, I used stylized materials in Substance 3D Painter with an enhanced normal map to bring more visual depth to the assets. Additionally, using the roughness channel provided satisfying improvements to the props. The candles went through several iterations, but from the beginning, I knew I wanted to have the flame modeled, especially since working with VFX in Blender wasn't part of my plan. They were the assets I sculpted the most in ZBrush. As for the material, I added SSS to achieve a more satisfying result.
As for the floor of the scene, I decided to create it directly in Blender's Sculpt Mode, also producing both a low-poly and a high-poly version. For that, I chose to generate a Displacement map and use it.
During the modeling stage, having instance assets saved me time. In the texturing stage, baking all the assets I was going to texture also helped me achieve the result I wanted more efficiently. During rendering, Blender's denoise feature helped me get my WIPs faster. In the texturing stage, I used only a Normal map instead of displacement, which also helped speed up production.
Retopoly and Texturing
The UV mapping was done entirely in Blender. I marked the seams using the Mark Seam tool and used the Angle Based (Unwrap) method to generate and organize the UV islands. I also manually adjusted the unwrapped UVs to avoid unnecessary cuts. After that, I made further manual adjustments to the islands to better optimize the use of available space and ensure a more efficient texture distribution.
When using Substance 3D Painter, I usually have a high-poly mesh to bake my asset so I can freely use materials and smart masks. Once baked, I usually define the base color of the model and start testing some ready-made materials from the software, adding color variations, adding displacement height variations, adding highlights to the corners of the geometry, adding inner shadows, exporting the textures, linking the maps in the Blender material, and seeing how the result looks.
Assembling the Final Scene
As I achieved satisfactory results with the separate assets, I began assembling the final scene by gradually replacing the blocking with the finished assets. I prioritized the elements that I knew would only require texture adjustments, which helped keep the workflow more agile. In the distribution of repeated props, I used instances, which optimized both production time and render performance.
In the composition, I sought a visual chain of interest, where the main point would be the interior of the bar, but also without leaving the other parts of the image lifeless. The texture details are the result of the balance between the Normal and Roughness maps, where light rarely passes directly through the scene without any variation on the surfaces.
Lighting
I have 71 lights in the scene, all necessary to compose the various light emission points of the project. I reinforced the candles' emission with area lights. I added rim lights to break up the monochromatic points of the wood and fill lights to avoid values too close to absolute darkness. The renders came out relatively quickly. I used Cycles in GPU mode from the beginning.
The render denoising helped me get previews faster and confirmed that I was on the right track. Since the overall lighting was satisfactory, I added other cameras to get close-up renders. Due to time constraints, I unfortunately didn't have time to work with Render Layers on this project. To conclude, there was little post-processing in this project. I only added a little bloom to have slightly stronger highlights.
Conclusion
It took me about a month to finish the entire project. The biggest challenge in this project was creating a workflow in software that was new to me, as I was only familiar with Maya until then. This process required constant adaptation to Blender's shortcuts and tools. Another important challenge was how to achieve a satisfactory result for the strings. Only in the final stages of the project did I decide to create them using Geometry Nodes.
The main lesson I learned from this project was the importance of experimenting with different approaches and not being afraid to change techniques, even in the most advanced stages. Often, the ideal solution arises precisely from testing new tools.
For beginner artists, my advice is to focus on consistency and not wait to master everything before starting more complex projects. Learning by doing is fundamental. Each project is an opportunity to evolve both technically and artistically.
