Modeling and Texturing Assets and Foliage for a Detailed 3D Environment

Introduction

Hi, my name is Elie Paquiet. I'm a French Environment/Material Artist previously working at Ubisoft, where I worked on AAA titles including Assassin's Creed Shadows, Rainbow Six Siege, Hyper Scape, and, more recently, on the canceled remake of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

With over eight years in the video game industry, I've had the opportunity to work on a wide range of assets, from material libraries and architecture kits to weapons, characters, and environment art. Material creation quickly became one of my greatest interests in game development. I enjoy crafting believable surfaces and materials that enhance environmental storytelling and contribute to the overall visual identity of a project.

I am particularly interested in understanding how materials and surfaces affect the overall artistic vision. I mainly work with industry-standard tools such as Substance 3D Designer and Painter, ZBrush, 3ds Max, Photoshop, and Unreal Engine to bring environments to life. I'm now focusing on my portfolio while looking for my next opportunity in the industry.

The Courtyard Project's Inspiration

Usually, I mostly work on textures and materials, or on very small scenes designed to test/showcase new features. But I realized that, with my title as a Texture Artist and a portfolio heavily focused on materials, I've never really had the opportunity to showcase the full range of my environment art skills. That's where the idea for this project came from. 

I thought of this project as an opportunity to shift my focus away from material creation and put greater emphasis on environment art. My goal here was to showcase the complete environment art workflow, from modeling and texturing an entire building kit and individual assets to building a cohesive scene with a strong focus on composition, lighting, and atmosphere. 

I didn't really plan to make this environment in particular, as I started the project at the end of February and desperately needed a taste of summer to escape the long Canadian winter. I naturally was heavily inspired by the Mediterranean atmosphere, without targeting a specific country or culture. Above all, I wanted this environment to feel credible, as it could exist in a fantasy world.

With this idea in mind, I started to gather references and concepts to clarify my vision and the overall aspect. This also allowed me to get a non-exhaustive overview of the number of assets I will need to produce and helped me determine what I need, what would be nice to have, and what is not really necessary. Below is an example of just some of my reference collection:

Blocking

With the courtyard area in mind, I modeled a draft version of my building kit, which allowed me to bring it into Unreal Engine and immediately identify the potential issues, test different sizes, and evaluate the spacing between elements.

This first step is extremely important, as it becomes the foundation for everything that follows. Any issues in the initial setup can easily carry over into later stages of the project. That doesn't mean you won't be able to make changes later on, but establishing a solid base from the beginning will make it much easier to add, modify, and iterate on your modules as the project progresses. 

Each module is based on a 3, 4.5, or 6-meter scale, meaning I can easily snap them together and build the courtyard with efficiency.

Once I had my first draft ready, I put down my first intentions for level art by adding simple assets to create a bit of context, such as plants and curtains. This also helped me realize that the overall shape of the buildings would read better with an additional roof layer and a few elements to break up the visual repetition.

I then introduced the large and small towers to add more variation and rhythm to the overall structure, giving the composition a stronger sense of hierarchy and depth. 

I'm a strong believer in the iterative and agile approach. I prefer to create a very rough first version of each element so I can quickly identify its scale, patterns, and overall identity. This allows me to move forward with a clear vision without worrying too much about quality at this stage. It also helps me identify areas for improvement, as well as elements that might be missing, unnecessary, or simply not working within the overall composition.

In other words, it's the classic "make it exist first, make it look good later." The priority is to get something working and visible as quickly as possible. Once the foundation is there, you'll have plenty of time to refine the details, improve the quality, and make it look good.

Iteration Process

When building my kit, I obviously update the modules in my main scene in real time, but I also take the time to build a small "beautiful corner" where I can quickly iterate on my modules, testing different scales or shapes. This area allows me to immediately see the impact of my changes and quickly evaluate the amount of work required to modify or add a new feature.

For example, if I decide to change the tiling of my roof tiles, I can instantly identify which modules are affected and make sure the change works consistently across the kit. This little testing area becomes a useful sandbox where I can experiment freely without losing sight of the bigger picture.

On the texturing side, I also follow the same iterative approach. I usually start with a rough first pass to define the scale, layout, patterns, and potential blends. At this stage, I often work mostly in gray, focusing on the normal information and overall surface definition rather than the final look.

Once the foundation feels right, I move on to a rough color pass to get a better sense of the material and how everything comes together. This allows me to validate the overall direction before investing time in the finer details and final polish.

Building the Architecture

Shader development isn't really my sweet spot, but I wanted to learn at least the basics so I could be more self-sufficient and able to build things on my own. This project was a good opportunity to push myself in that direction.

I kept the main shader fairly simple. It uses a main material that can be blended with a second one, using the red vertex color channel to control the blend. I can also add a layer of moss on top, which helps with blending, breaks up the repetition, and adds more contextual variation to the modules. This layer is driven by the Green channel. Finally, I have an additional fourth layer of leaks, controlled through the Blue channel.

This gives me a way to push the material further, adding more localized details and variation in specific areas where needed. For this project, I didn't want to end up with a huge number of materials. I wanted to keep things simple and get a lot out of a limited number of materials. This also allowed me to focus more on other aspects of the project that I'm less experienced with.

When it came to creating the roof tiles, I had to choose between a traditional tileable texture approach or a kitbash workflow using individually baked tiles. I decided to go with the second option, even though it might seem a little crazy at first, for two main reasons.

First, the scene is relatively small and doesn't contain a huge number of assets. Second and more importantly, this approach gives me a lot of flexibility. Since the tiles are fully modeled, I can easily create almost any roof shape I want, allowing me to generate a lot of variation without sacrificing detail.

The biggest advantage of this workflow, in my opinion, is the quality of the shadows. Because every tile is actually modeled, small gaps naturally appear between the elements, creating really nice shadow details. This adds a strong sense of depth and greatly enhances the overall quality and realism of the assets.

On top of that, Unreal Engine's Nanite workflow makes it much more viable to use this kind of geometry-heavy approach. This makes the trade-off between flexibility, detail, and performance much more appealing for this type of scene.

Set Dressing the Scene

Another dilemma I faced was deciding how to approach the pots. Should I make them tileable with a mid-res mesh? Use a pattern trim with UV2 mapping? Or simply create a small kit of baked pots?
I ended up choosing the third option, baking them, mainly because it gave me full control over their shapes and appearance.

But also, considering how many pots I wanted to have throughout the scene, I thought it was worth baking them, especially since they are such a prominent element and can be seen almost everywhere. It results in two 1024px texture sets, one for the 3 large pots, the second for the 4 smaller pots.

For the rugs, I decided to make things easier for myself by creating a trim sheet. I have to admit, it was actually quite nice to spend some time in Substance 3D Designer and just relax while working on patterns (I like it). Once the first rug was finished, I wanted to create a second variation without having to make an entirely new set of patterns, so I simply exported a second base color with warmer red tones.

Here's an animated breakdown showing the progression of how I built the rug patterns:

For the fabric meshes, Livine Sigier taught me and convinced me that Marvelous Designer is easy to use, especially for simple meshes like curtains, and it was convenient for me to try out the software. See below how I created a convincing mesh in less than a minute.

All the fabrics in the scene (curtains, cushions, sheets) are only textured with 512px tileable textures. Concerning the water plane for the pond, I watched quite a few tutorials and combined different techniques to achieve the look I wanted for my scene. I would particularly recommend this one from World of Level Design, as it helped me better understand how to achieve this kind of shader:

For the set dressing itself, I simply asked myself a few questions like: How can I make it look good? How can I make it benefit potential gameplay? Is it convincing enough? What would I think if I were playing a game in this environment? How can I make it work with the composition of the preset camera angle? The keyword here is balance.

Creating the Foliage

I never really had the opportunity to work on foliage in a production environment, but it's something that has always interested and intrigued me. This project was also a great opportunity to explore this aspect of environment art.

Taking advantage of a trip to Montreal with my family, I visited the Botanical Garden, where I was able to take close-up photos of real leaves and plants. This gave me a much better understanding of the subtle variations and details within the foliage. It is always pleasant to get to see them with your own eyes!

Based on the references I gathered, I knew I wanted to include specific types of plants, such as water lilies, monstera, and cordylines. I started with the larger plants, which I divided into two 1024px texture sets. Each plant has its own set.

I created these textures in Substance 3D Designer. Here's the height map sculpt and color process for the Ravenala plant:

Concerning the Monstera plant, I drew an ID map in Photoshop to make it faster and easier to isolate masks in Substance 3D Designer.

For the climbing vine, I reused the texture from my smaller plants and modeled several different leaves in high resolution on top of it. I then bent and scattered them across multiple branches, varying their size and orientation to create a more natural look.

Once the setup was complete, I baked the branches onto a plane to generate the different texture maps I needed to continue the texturing process in Substance 3D Painter. The final texture set is 1k.

Once the assets were baked and the texture was completed, I first separated the different branches into individual plane meshes.

I then assembled them into small clusters to give them a more natural and organic appearance, while also making them easy to place and use in Unreal Engine.

Composition

Placing the camera to create an interesting image can sometimes be a very time-consuming process. Personally, the two composition rules I rely on the most are the golden spiral and the rule of thirds, which I find to be the most effective compositional guides.

I usually start by positioning the camera so that the main focal point follows the golden spiral. This naturally guides the viewer's eye through the frame instead of trapping their attention in the center of the image. I then try to align the main elements of the composition as closely as possible with the curves of the Fibonacci spiral, occasionally moving a few plants or props to better fit the composition. This frames and structures the overall composition.

The goal is not to completely reshape the level art to accommodate a specific camera angle, but rather to find a balance where the environment and the composition from this angle can coexist naturally. In other words, as long as it looks good in both perspectives, you're good.

Usually, the focus point of the golden spiral lands near the power points of the rule of thirds grid. Here I was able to combine both and get an impactful composition. I had a focus point on the small tower and divided my image into three balanced sections on the smaller side of the golden spiral. This creates a more balanced visual rhythm and keeps the viewer's attention focused on the main point of interest.

To help position the camera more effectively and find interesting shots, Unreal Engine provides a dedicated tool that can be enabled in the Cinematic Viewport.

Lighting Setup

A Mediterranean setting naturally calls for warm and inviting summer vibe lighting. The challenging part is that the process can be quite technical; that's why I kept things simple within the limits of what I knew and understood. However, I would recommend starting to play with the parameters and see what does what; the results can be very rewarding. 

For this scene, my approach was mostly trial and error until I was convinced the lighting was coherent and matched the mood I was looking for. The scene is mainly lit with a directional light coupled with an HDRI backdrop. I added a few spotlights here and there to enhance specific elements and subtly guide the viewer's eye.

The Exponential Height Fog and the Volumetric Scattering Intensity parameter of the Directional light are playing a big role in grounding the whole image and giving the scene more depth.

I took advantage of the different layers of the building and the shapes the architecture gave to create pockets of warm colors and add contrast. This helped create more visual depth and reinforced the warm Mediterranean atmosphere.

For each camera angle, I take the time to fine-tune the lens settings. I carefully adjust the focus distance and focal length to make sure the subject I want to highlight is properly in focus. I also adjust the exposure parameters if needed, and I often reduce the default bloom intensity by at least half, as I usually find it a bit too strong. I then add a very subtle amount of film grain and a touch of sharpening to the final image.

For the color grading, I kept things simple as well, mainly making subtle adjustments to better match the overall mood I was aiming for. I pushed the blue values slightly in the shadows while introducing warmer tones into the midtones. I also boosted the overall saturation to make the colors pop more and help the different elements of the image stand out.

Conclusion

I started this project in February and put the final touches in July, working on it here and there whenever I had some spare time. For a personal project like this one, I prefer to take my time and go slowly but surely, while getting feedback from friends and colleagues along the way to make sure I'm heading in the right direction. We're always better when we have people around us to support and challenge us.

Many challenges came up throughout the creation of this courtyard. One of the first was figuring out how to build a shader myself that could achieve the look and functionality I wanted. It wasn't easy at first, but as with everything, with enough time and patience, you learn and eventually get there. Creating the foliage was also a challenge in itself. Even though I already had a good idea of how I wanted to approach it, I had never really worked on foliage at this scale and amount before, so it was definitely a learning experience. 

If someone were to take on a project of a similar scope, I would strongly recommend taking the time to plan the layout, thinking about the modularity and key modules early on, and above all, not overlooking the value of feedback from others. But most importantly, listen to yourself. If you're working on a project that will keep you focused and engaged in the long run, that you're doing in your free time, and that you genuinely want to make great while learning new things, make sure to give yourself the time to do it properly.

Don't rush it and don't feel guilty when you are not progressing as fast as you'd like to. Creating is a process, not a competition.

If one day you don't feel like working on your project (even something you want to do from the bottom of your heart), go do something else. Don't force yourself, as it will only lead to frustration. Taking breaks is part of the work. Stepping away can give you a fresh perspective and bring back a whole new level of motivation when you return. Do what you can, when you can, and let the motivation come naturally.

If you have any comments or questions, please just reach out — I will be more than happy to discuss them. Special thanks to Stephanie Almogabar and 80 Level for giving me the opportunity to write these few words. It was a pleasure! I really hope it will help or inspire you as much as it did when I was reading other articles and breakdowns here.

Elie Paquiet, Environment and Material Artist

Interview conducted by Stephanie Almogabar