Modeling & Texturing a Detailed Dormitory Scene with a Hand-Painted Style

Introduction

Hi, I'm Morgane Muller, a 3D Environment Artist from Bordeaux, France. I have just graduated with a degree in 3D Environment Art from Artside and am currently looking for my first job. Having long been passionate about art, I initially set out to study design before discovering video games in high school. I first looked into studying to become a concept artist, and I ended up at Artside. I learned the fundamentals and discovered 3D during my first two years of study, and I went on to specialize in 3D environments for a further two years. 

During my final year at Artside, I had the opportunity to work on a four-month individual project. For this project, I turned Gabriel Nagypal’s concept "Spellbound Dormitory" into 3D; I created it under the supervision of Sacha Veyrier, Quentin Ferlay, Yoan Autin, Lionel Cregut, and Clément Masset, who gave me feedback and taught me throughout this project.

Project Inspiration & Goals

My first step in this project was to research concepts. I was looking for something stylized, moody, and colorful with impactful lighting. For this individual project, I wanted to do some hand-painting because it's something I really enjoy doing, so this project was the perfect opportunity for me to create an entire hand-painted environment.

I went for Gabriel Nagypal’s "Spellbound Dormitory" concept because of its variety of materials, props, and lighting, and because it included trim elements, tileables, and organic features. As a reference for the hand-painting, I mainly drew on Studio Nuare's work on "Jinx Fixes Everything."

Planning

Once my concept was chosen, I planned the tasks I had to do during the project, breaking down my image to identify the different elements in it, the techniques I could use to create them, the textures that would need to be produced, and which elements could be reused. Most of the time, I take the concept and sketch it out with notes to see what I’ll need to do. Then I take each element of my concept and estimate how long it will take me to create it; allowing more time than it should take, I then put it all into a schedule.

Blockout & Modeling

Once I finalized my schedule, I started creating the blockout. I spent two weeks on it; I did my blockout in Blender before importing it into Unreal Engine. I imported my blockout on the very first day so that I could quickly set up a camera and the first light. Personally, I like to "make it exist first, make it good later," so I started my blocking with simple, slightly rough shapes to position my elements and work out their proportions.

This concept contains quite a few elements, so I've worked on them in order of importance, from the most important to the least important; I generally determine this based on the space they take up in the image.

Once their positioning and proportions are more or less right, I start to refine the modeling a little and add a base color to the elements; this allows me to see how my lighting affects my colors and which ones I’ll need to use for my texturing.

The concept had no complex elements; the modeling was simple, with very little detail, so I didn’t need to sculpt my assets. Elements such as the tree needed just a little more work on their shape, so I added small meshes on the surface to create a peeling bark effect. The meshes have two data transfers to get the trunk’s normals and the UVs to fit trunk textures, and the bottom parts of the meshes are shrink-wrapped to the trunk.

Spending time on blocking helps build a solid foundation that saves time; between my blocking and the final version, the elements have changed relatively little.

For my UVs, I used the TexTools and UVPackmaster add-ons to unwrap them. Since I was hand-painting, I paid special attention to how I unwrapped my UVs; I had to be careful not to distort them so that those distortions wouldn't affect the result of my painting on the UVs.

Texturing

For my tileables, I made a base in Substance 3D Designer that I rework in Photoshop; otherwise, I texture in Substance 3D Painter. Starting with a base color, I add color variation. On some assets, I add fake bounce light, then I paint deterioration and run a pass to ensure that the element blends into the scene; most of the time, I do this last pass in Photoshop.

I go back and forth during the full texturing process to check how my colors look in the scene and if my details are visible enough. As my modeling was rather simple, I didn't use normals that much in my texturing; exceptions are the tree and trim parts. 

Making the stained glass was quite challenging. I initially wanted to go for a classic glass shader with translucency. But with a shader like that, there was no way to achieve the vivid look of the concept art, so I was directed toward an opaque shader with an emissive component to simulate the glass translucency.

To break repetition in the wall’s tileable, I added vertex paint with a second texture; the same goes for the trim. This allowed me to scratch the paint off the trim and create a slightly different fresco around the two windows, to match the concept.

As I had a lot of books to create, I've added a "custom primitive data" node that lets me choose the color of my books, so I can select the color of each book individually or in a group from a range of shades; I also have the option to generate colors at random.

The vegetation and the background visible from the balcony and the window were created using the same technique: planes with transparency. As for the background, I used this technique because what's visible is very far away, so a plane depicting the background was more than enough, as this element did not need to be detailed. Modeling the background would also have taken a long time.

Lighting & Rendering

For the lighting, I used a directional light, ExponentialHeightFog, a PostProcessVolume, Sky Atmosphere, Sky Light, and smaller lights to highlight certain areas. While the lighting mainly relies on a strong directional light and subtler elements, I also aimed to recreate specific details from the concept – for example, the reflection on the ground, which I achieved by adjusting the ground's roughness and using the Sky Light.

ExponentialHeightFog allows me to get a lot of depth in my scene; without it, the scene looks flatter. Here's what the scene looks like without and with the ExponentialHeightFog.

One of my challenges was to create this vivid orange terminator on the ground between light and shadows. For a while, I tried to use two directional lights, playing with their colors and priorities to achieve it. The result wasn't really satisfying, so I ended up using decals with a gradient fading on the sides.

I didn't do much post-processing; when I started working on my scene, I adjusted the exposure to get the lighting right, and at the end, I added just a tiny bit of bloom to my scene to emphasize the dreamy mood. To bring the environment to life, I added some subtle animation to a few elements, such as the plants and the crystal. To do this, I simply used a World Position Offset for the crystal, making it rotate on the Z-axis, and a simple wind node in the shader with vertex color for the vegetation.

For my rendering, I used the Movie Render Queue with two different export settings: one for image renders and one for video renders, and I mainly adjusted the anti-aliasing settings depending on the type of render. For my video render, I exported some images, which I then compiled in DaVinci Resolve to get my video.

Conclusion

Thank you for your time. I hope you enjoyed this article. I had an incredible time working on this project, which allowed me to realize what I was capable of in just a few months. I’d like to thank my supervisors for their feedback and for everything they’ve taught me over the past year and during this project. 

If I had to give one piece of advice to someone just starting out, I’d tell them to trust the process. Starting this sort of project might seem daunting at first, but by following a process and using reference materials, the result will simply take time – time that will decrease as you gain experience. I would never have been able to complete this project two years ago, yet I've managed to do it today. So believe in yourself, because everyone has to start somewhere.  

If you'd like to see more of my work, you can have a look at my ArtStation and LinkedIn; and if you want to see more of my Spellbound Dormitory project, here is my ArtStation post.

Morgane Muller, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Stephanie Almogabar