Medieval Market: A Detailed Guide on Stylized Environment Art in Unreal Engine

Introduction

Hello everyone. I'm Kristina Nakić, a 3D Environment Artist currently working as a freelancer. I'm excited to share a Stylized Medieval Market environment I created in collaboration with Leartes Studios. 

It's a game-ready scene built in Unreal Engine 5. I used Blender, ZBrush, Substance 3D tools, and UE5 throughout the process. In this article, I'll go over some key elements like materials, foliage, lighting, clouds, and modular pieces.

Goals of the Project

The concept for this environment was provided by Leartes Studios and created by the talented artist Darya Suvorava. The main goal was to bring that concept to life as a vibrant, game-ready environment with a Ghibli-inspired look focusing on color, atmosphere, lighting, and stylized shapes.

While staying true to the original concept, I also wanted to add some personal touches, especially through hand-painted textures combined with detailed Normal Maps to give surfaces more depth and variation.

Another important goal was modularity. I created a large set of modular architecture pieces that allowed me to build multiple unique houses, five in total for this project, but the system is flexible enough to support a wide range of variations.

Scope of Work

This environment involved a full production workflow, starting with creating the landscape and moving through foliage, architecture, materials, and VFX. I built a variety of foliage types to match the stylized theme and created modular architecture with material blending, vertex painting, decals, and custom shaders.

The material work was done in Substance 3D Designer and Painter. I also created a large number of props for set dressing, helping bring the scene to life.

To match the concept's mood, I built a custom cloud setup and added VFX elements to enhance the atmosphere. The environment is also fully interior-ready, allowing for exploration inside the buildings.

Blockout & Composition

Since the ground in the concept wasn't flat, I started the blockout by shaping the landscape using Unreal Engine's landscape sculpting tools. I also set up a simple landscape material early on to help with visual readability during the layout process.

Once the terrain was established, I moved on to blocking out the architecture and props. I created detailed blockout meshes in Blender, especially for the modular pieces I planned to use later. I spent quite a bit of time planning out the modular system during this stage, that way, I could build houses directly from those pieces and immediately see how well everything would fit together. After assembling the buildings, I converted them into blueprints and began populating the scene in UE5.

For props, I used simple geometry provided by Unreal just to get a sense of space and layout. I also applied basic material setups to blockout meshes, mainly to visualize colors and composition without committing to detailed textures too early.

My goal was to match the concept art as closely as possible, and I began with a specific camera angle that aligned with the original artwork. From there, I adjusted the rest of the environment to support that primary view while also ensuring the layout made sense for gameplay.

By the end of the blockout phase, I had a clear vision of the final environment. The modular system was already tested and working well, so the final stage was mostly about replacing the placeholders with finished assets.

Modeling & Modularity

I created a full modular kit based on Leartes Studios' guidelines. I followed their standard of using a 50 cm grid, with modular part dimensions like 150 cm, 300 cm, and 600 cm. Most of my wall modules, for example, were 300×300 cm, but I also created variations like 150×300 and 600×300 depending on design needs.

The modular set included walls, windows, doors, terraces, wooden pillars, roofs, and stairs — in total, I built around 130 unique pieces. While the houses all share the same design language, each one includes unique elements like custom window and door placements or slightly different proportions. Because of that, I had to create a wide variety of modules, but everything is built to be fully compatible, allowing for unlimited variations and new combinations.

All modeling was done in Blender. For sculpted details, especially on wooden elements, I used ZBrush to add stylized surface variation that complements the hand-painted look.

I focused on keeping the geometry optimized, aiming for low poly wherever possible, but allowed for a bit more geometry on pieces where I planned to use vertex painting. Many models use tiling textures, with UVs unwrapped to maintain a texel density of 10.24. I also created trimsheets and unwrapped some assets specifically for those, which helped maintain consistency while reducing texture memory.

One of the more challenging parts of the process was creating the modular roof system. There were five different roof types needed to match the concept, and each had to fit within the overall modular framework while maintaining a consistent visual style. It required careful planning to ensure all pieces worked well together across different building variations.

Texturing & Materials

For texturing, I used both Substance 3D Painter and Substance 3D Designer, combining hand-painted elements with baked normal details. My goal was to stay close to the Ghibli-inspired style, so I focused on soft color transitions, visible brush strokes, and painterly textures that still felt detailed and game-ready.

Props & Sculpted Assets

Many of the props, especially food items like fruits, vegetables, pastries, and fish, were hand-painted in Substance 3D Painter, and I used baked normal maps where needed. For wooden pieces, I sculpted details in ZBrush, baked the normals, and created trimsheets that I reused across assets to keep a consistent visual language.

Tiling Materials & Vertex Painting

In Substance 3D Designer, I created a full library of tileable stylized materials, including: plaster and dirt wall variations, brick and stone, concrete, roof tiles, glass, and floor tiles. Most of these materials were used with vertex painting in Unreal Engine, particularly on walls, to add surface variation and break up repetition. This helped achieve a more natural feel.

Glass Shader

For the windows, I designed a glass material that combines a hand-painted texture (with visible strokes) and a transparency setup. This let me reuse the glass across houses, especially important since the interiors in some houses were also modeled and visible through the windows.

Foliage Material

I built a custom foliage material designed for flexibility. I created a tileable texture for color variety and used a mask texture to define leaf shapes. In the material, I set parameters for tint, hue shift, and subsurface color, allowing for a wide range of looks while still keeping the texture's color richness.

Clouds

For the clouds, I painted an RGB texture in Photoshop using custom brushes, then set up a material that reads each RGB channel as a different cloud layer, with separate color controls. This allowed me to fine-tune the clouds' mood, tone, and time-of-day settings while keeping them stylistically consistent with the concept.

Lighting & Atmosphere

For the lighting, I used Lumen, with the main goal of matching the concept as closely as possible and achieving soft, layered lighting throughout the scene. I kept the setup pretty simple: a directional light with a warm tone and low intensity, an HDRI-based skylight with slightly bluish light, and a sky sphere to help with the overall atmosphere.

To get soft shadows, I adjusted the shadow filter sharpness to 0.16 and set the contact shadow length to 0.06, which helped create that soft, painterly feel I was aiming for. I also used exponential fog with a light density and a bluish tint, and enabled volumetric fog to help with depth and mood.

For post-processing, I used some subtle color grading, along with a few tweaks to the toe and white clip settings to get better contrast without losing the stylized softness. I also placed a rim light to help shape the scene a bit more.

Throughout the environment, I used a lot of point and spot lights to highlight smaller areas and bring attention to details, especially around props and interiors. These lights helped guide the eye and added some warmth and variation without breaking the overall tone of the scene.

Closing Thoughts

Working on this environment was a great experience, and I really enjoyed the entire process, from planning out the modular system to building props, creating materials, and setting up the lighting to match the concept.

Big thanks to Leartes Studios for the opportunity, to Oguzhan Kar, the Founder of Leartes Studios, to Tolga İlhan the Project Manager, to Darya Suvorava for the beautiful concept art, and especially to Canan Boran, my Art Director on this project, for the guidance and support throughout the process.

You can check out the Stylized Medieval Market environment on Cosmos and Fab.

Kristina Nakic, 3D Artist