Modular Nighttime Medieval Town Created With Blender & UE5

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Allan Politano. I'm 26 years old and I'm from São Paulo, Brazil. I began studying 3D art in 2014 through a small course in my city, however, only in 2017 I truly focused on becoming a 3D artist, diving into online courses and personal projects. In my early years, I concentrated on props for games and asset creation for augmented reality.

For the past two years, I have shifted my focus to environment art, and with the help of the online course Environment Art Mastery by Thiago Klafke, my skills in this area have improved a lot. Throughout my career, I've contributed to several projects, including Microsoft Flight Simulator and my current project, Blood Loop.

The Wood Grove Town Project

As I do on most of my projects, I began gathering references to capture the mood I wanted. For this environment, my goal was to create a warm and happy city, so I got references from many places and games I like: The Witcher 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Chivalry 2, and others.

Once I had enough references, I created a quick concept art to establish the main camera shot for the environment. This helped me work on the design blockout using modular pieces, following the workflow I learned from Thiago Klafke.

With the simple concept and design blockout in hand, I developed a second blockout with pieces modeled in Blender. I used a screenshot in Unreal to refine the final concept art and begin the art blockout phase. I created the concept art in Krita, a fantastic tool for drawing environments.

I also planned the top view design, the gate, and the second area of the village.

I modified the second area slightly at the final stage because the composition wasn't looking quite right. This shot was not included in the final project:

After that, I focused on the final models and scene, using the Nanite and Lumen workflows.

Buildings

I created big unique models for the buildings and most of them with two main faces (front and back). This allowed me to create just one building and rotate it for variation, as shown below:

I also utilized a modular workflow to speed up the process. For elements like wood beams, windows, doors, chimneys, and roof windows, I created a few variations and applied them across all the models. I populated the wood elements inside Blender so I could update the sculpted version if needed.

For the walls outside the village, I created just a few pieces to place as needed.

And since I was using the Nanite workflow, for things like the bricks and the ground cobblestones, I utilized the Displace modifier inside Blender.

For the roofs, my focus was to create them as single pieces and spread them randomly across the meshes. That was a challenge to do manually, so I found a great tutorial on Geometry Nodes and created a tool for easily generating roof meshes with the necessary randomness.

With the Nanite workflow in Unreal 5.1, I couldn't use vertex painting for the buildings. Instead, my teacher introduced me to the RGB Masks workflow, a powerful method for adding dirt and color variation to buildings.

To use this workflow, you'll need to create a second UV channel for your building, placing your UVs at the boundaries of the UV square. I duplicated the main mesh, moved it to another collection, and deleted the first UV channel so I could texture it inside Substance 3D Painter. In Substance 3D Painter, you should create 3 "user channels" (R, G, B) and set up a new export preset to export these channels.

For more details, refer to the tutorial "Adding dirt to models in Unreal Engine using Masks" from FastTrack Tutorials. Below is an example of one of the houses where I applied the RGB mask for the plaster:

The last thing I did on the buildings was create the night view inside meshes. I used a workflow inspired by Marvel's Spider-Man, utilizing fake interiors with plane meshes.

Although I had never created fake interior planes before, I found several good tutorials, and it was straightforward to do in Unreal. It's a simple technique, but I never get tired of seeing the final result:

The castle in the background was created following the prop workflow since, at that distance, it would not be so easy to apply decals and RGB masks. These pieces have non-tileable textures and were textured inside Substance 3D Painter.

Finally, to populate the scene, I purchased a pack called "Medieval Market Optimized" from the Unreal Marketplace. The pack is excellent, and I enjoyed integrating it into my environment.

For assets with tileable textures, the UVs were set with a texel density of 10.24. I created textures for the environment using Megascans or the Substance 3D Painter library, adjusting them in Substance 3D Painter or Photoshop.

Vegetation

For the vegetation pass, I decided to create only a few models, as my primary focus was the buildings. I used trees and ivy from Megascans and adjusted them as needed. The grass and window flowers were created using Blender and Substance 3D Painter.

Feedback from Luca Tietto, Lead Environment Artist at JyammaGames, suggested making the grass thicker and more stylized to improve its appearance in the composition.

You can see below the difference between the old and the new grass:

Clouds

I couldn't find any free auto-generated clouds that I liked, so Luca Tietto recommended a tutorial on creating cloud planes named "UE4 Cloud Creating Tutorial". Here is one of the samples that I created:

The final result looks great, and it's not difficult to achieve. For a stylized environment, this is a very powerful workflow.

Light Setup

Lighting is not my specialty, so I followed a well-explained tutorial by Karim Abou Shousha, "How to create photorealism lighting in UE5". Below, you can see the difference before and after the light adjustment:

Using the tutorial, I adjusted the intensity and created a skylight with an HDR image:

Finally, I created the night scene. I always enjoy experimenting with lighting after completing the environment. Using Lumen, it’s easy and fun to see different times of day. I achieved the final result by following the lighting tutorial mentioned above. For the sky, I used the free marketplace asset "Good Sky", which includes the moon and stars. I recreated the clouds with cloud planes and used spotlights for light bouncing on the roofs.

Conclusion

This was a brief breakdown of my scene. It took approximately a year and a half to complete (not full-time production). My advice to anyone looking to create something similar is to focus on what you are trying to improve since It takes a lot of time to polish everything to look good in the end. In my case, I reduced the production of props and vegetation, but the project still took a long time to finish. If you plan to tackle various aspects (modeling, texturing, composition, foliage, lighting, etc.), consider starting with a smaller scene.

Larger environments are enjoyable to create and look impressive when completed, but the production time can be lengthy, and you can learn and improve techniques with smaller environments as well. I hope you found this article helpful and that it assists you in creating great projects. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on ArtStation or LinkedIn. See you next time!

Allan Politano, 3D Environment & Prop Artist