How to Turn a 2D Concept Into a Colorful and Lively 3D Environment

Introduction

Hi! My name is Anastasiia Manaeva, and I am a 3D Environment Artist based in Seattle. My journey into 3D started with character art creation courses. I was fascinated by the process, but over time I realized that creating environments was much closer to what I truly enjoyed. I love building not just individual assets but entire worlds with their own atmosphere and story.

To improve my skills, I enrolled at Think Tank Training Centre, where I learned modern environment art workflows. Matsuri became my mentorship project and the largest environment I have created so far. Although I haven't worked in the industry yet, I have spent the last few years creating personal projects to improve both my artistic and technical skills.

Matsuri

I found the original concept in the art book Mysterious Scenes from a Dark Fantasy World: Background Illustrations and Scenes by Up-and-Coming Creators. The artwork was created by Yuuri (有里). As soon as I saw it, I immediately wanted to recreate it in 3D. The concept had everything I love. It felt like a small game level that I wanted to explore myself.

I could already imagine walking between the food stalls, looking at all the little details, and experiencing the atmosphere. I collected all my references in PureRef, where I organized references for the float's construction, traditional Japanese festivals, architectural details, and props for the market stalls. One of the biggest challenges was that the original illustration only shows the front of the festival float, so I had to design everything that wasn't visible.

I reused many elements from the front and imagined what the back would realistically look like if this float existed at a real Japanese summer festival. Another challenge from the very beginning was understanding how such a huge structure could actually work. I spent a lot of time studying references of traditional Japanese festival floats.

Although they were much smaller than the one in the concept, they helped me understand how the wooden construction could support such heavy loads. Together with my mentor, we developed a believable structural plan, so the final design would feel grounded in reality while still staying faithful to the original concept. A circular wooden support acts as the core of the structure, with beams extending outward to carry the building's weight.

Modeling

Since the concept already had a very strong composition, my goal was to preserve its feeling while making the environment believable in 3D. The illustration immediately draws your attention to the festival float itself, but with so many details, the eye can easily wander without a clear focal point. I wanted to strengthen that focus by leading the viewer's eye toward the large drum in the center of the composition, while allowing the shops and smaller details to gradually reveal themselves.

To achieve this, I used atmospheric fog to separate the scene into layers and make the center read brighter and more clearly. I started the blockout directly in Unreal Engine. This helped me quickly understand the overall scale of the float and how all the different structural parts would fit together. Some aspects of the concept were challenging to interpret in terms of scale, so that stage took longer than I initially expected.

The architectural elements were built from a small modular kit of wooden parts like pillars, floors, walls sections that could be reused across multiple levels of the float. For the illuminated signs, I used emissive materials in Unreal Engine. Once the blockout was defined, I moved into Maya for detailed modeling. Most assets were created there, while ZBrush was used for organic elements such as the octopus decoration and food props.

One unexpectedly difficult part of the project was the Japanese signage. There were many signs throughout the environment, and it was surprisingly easy to get lost among all the different characters. Downloading Japanese fonts and using Maya's text tools made it much easier to create believable signs while maintaining enough visual variety.

Because the original concept included many people, I had to find another way to make the environment feel alive without adding characters. I spent a lot of time thinking about how visitors would actually move through the float. I separated different areas with curtains, which were created in Marvelous Designer, and imagined how people could naturally walk through the circular structure.

Retopology and Texturing

All hard-surface assets were modeled directly in Maya, where I tried to keep them game-ready from the beginning, so most of them did not require a separate retopology pass. For organic assets created in ZBrush, I mostly relied on Decimation Master to generate optimized geometry before bringing them into the game pipeline.

For UV unwrapping, I used RizomUV. Since the project contains a large number of unique assets, RizomUV significantly sped up the UV workflow and made packing much more efficient. I used standard UV layouts. Most of the textures use 2K resolution, which provides enough detail while keeping the project manageable.

Texturing was primarily done in Substance 3D Painter. For repetitive decorative elements such as floral ornaments, I used trim sheets to reduce the need for unique texture sets. I also created a procedural wood material in Substance 3D Designer that could easily be adjusted for different assets. By blending several variations, I added more color variation and wear, especially on the wooden pillars.

Also, I used vertex painting on the roof to blend different roof textures and break up repetition. I created RGB mask materials for assets such as the lanterns and the ice cream machine, allowing me to add localized wear, dirt, and color variation without creating additional texture sets. Many of the signs use a material that allows me to change the text directly through the UV layout, making them easy to reuse.

There are many lanterns throughout the scene, so I created an emissive shader to create a warm nighttime glow. For decals, I used generic grayscale grunge masks, as well as custom black-and-white masks exported from Substance 3D Designer, to create different wear and dirt effects.

For the glass, I used the Advanced Material Pack from UB, which provided a convincing physically based glass shader. Throughout the project, I relied on reusable materials whenever possible while keeping unique textures for hero assets that viewers would see up close.

Assembling the Scene

I assembled the entire scene in Unreal Engine 5, following the original concept as closely as possible. I first placed simple placeholder assets to establish the layout, then gradually replaced them with the final versions while keeping the same positions. Whenever the concept contained repeating architectural elements, I reused modular assets.

Once the main structure was complete, I placed props such as lanterns, signs, decorations, and food displays to make the environment feel more lived in while staying faithful to the original artwork. I also frequently walked through the scene in real-time and checked it from the character's point of view to make sure the scale, composition, and readability worked well from a player's perspective.

I added several subtle animated elements. I created several Niagara effects, including swimming fish, falling flower petals, sparkling particles, and the waterfall effect. The project also includes animated shaders, such as moving lanterns and floating spheres, animated water, and a flickering illuminated neon sign.

The clouds were created using free VDB assets in Unreal Engine, while the flags and hanging ribbons use Unreal Engine's cloth simulation for more natural movement. I also used the Foliage tool to paint mesh directly on static mesh surfaces.

Lighting

I started with a very basic lighting setup using an HDRI sky wrapped around an inverted sphere (HDRIs from hdrihaven.com). This provided the initial ambient lighting and helped establish the overall mood of the scene. For the main lighting, I used a single directional light combined with a skylight to build a simple and controllable base setup. On top of that, I added point lights throughout the environment to emphasize key areas and improve readability.

Lighting was one of the most challenging parts of the project because the environment contains a large number of emissive light sources. Finding the right balance between emissive materials and the overall lighting required a lot of iteration. I used Lumen and rendered the scene in Movie Render Queue in Unreal Engine 5. I used EasyFog by William Faucher together with a cloud shader built from a free VDB asset.

The fog helped create depth in the scene and guided the viewer's attention toward the focal points. For post-processing, I mainly adjusted exposure, bloom, and vignette. Since this is a night scene with many glowing signs and lanterns, bloom was important for keeping the lights warm and readable without overexposing the image. Exposure required constant tweaking because of the large number of emissive elements competing for attention.

Conclusion

The project took approximately eight months to complete. The main challenge was the scale and density of the environment. With so many unique assets, it was easy to fall into constant refinement, which made it difficult to determine when a piece was truly finished. Lighting was another major challenge. Balancing a large number of emissive light sources while maintaining a clear focal point took much longer than expected.

The goal was to keep the scene vibrant without making it visually overwhelming. Looking back, the biggest lesson I learned is not to avoid ambitious projects out of uncertainty. At the beginning, I was unsure how to solve many of the technical and artistic challenges in this concept, but I realized that this uncertainty is part of the process.

You learn by working through problems step by step rather than waiting to know everything in advance. My advice to beginner artists is to choose projects that genuinely excite you. Long productions can be challenging, and motivation plays a huge role.

Anastasiia Manaeva, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins