Working on a Medieval Building with Blender and Quixel Tools

Medieval Village: About the Project

As part of my learning process, I always try to create some scenes that I like, either from a real picture, concept art, game scenery, or simply an idea I have in mind. This learning process helps me keep up the pace in the only software I ever use which is Blender!

The idea of this piece appeared after searching for some inspirational shots taken from the Assassin's Creed game series. Medieval games are probably my favorite, it's just something that I really enjoy seeing, experiencing, or creating. I have created two medieval scenes before this one and I was really happy with the results. This time, I wanted to create a more complicated building which led me to choose this particular scene. I gathered reference images from Pinterest and Google mostly, not from the game itself.

While looking for references, I had one point in mind – some sort of a building that requires more effort than just creating a few boxes with the right textures on and then adding a few windows... Something much more detailed to step up my modeling and texturing skills in Blender.

Experience with Blender

As someone who tried and learned Blender as his first 3D software ever, I can't say that A is better than B or C or anything like that. I consider myself a "new" 3D artist who started learning 3D only a year ago, and since then I focused on learning Blender mainly. Not going to lie, I used 3ds Max for about a month or so but I always end up going back to Blender simply because it's very user-friendly and there's an answer/tutorial for anything you might need out there! Not to mention that it's a free software solution that is capable of anything you want to do if not more!

Besides that, I find it very easy to do modeling and texturing when the are quick shortcuts to almost every command you will use in Blender. Plus Eevee and Cycles are amazing engines – if you want some quick preview in real-time for your textured model, Eevee is your best friend, and if you are going for a more photorealistic approach, Cycles can handle it very quickly nowadays, with all the updates that make rendering super fast in Blender.

Modeling Stage

The first thing I did was importing the reference image into fSpy which is an external software solution that allows you to match and set the right field of view and angle for your camera in Blender. Then I divided the main building into different parts and started modeling each part in its entirety before moving on to the next. For uneven wooden planks, I created simple cubes with a few loop cuts and edited them using Proportional Editing; once I had a convincing number of different planks it was just a matter of copying and pasting where I needed them.

While modeling the main building, I tried to maintain a low polycount. From my experience in creating environments and buildings in Blender, I now try to have an idea of the final texturing stage for each object/building/prop. For this building and based on the reference I knew I'd use one main texture which is the white damaged plaster and after that, I'd add 1 or 2 leaking decals. This led me to modeling very simple walls with a few loop cuts for my windows and I didn't need a high and dense amount of vertices to do any sort of vertex painting for mixing different textures.

When working on a big piece like this one, I tend to finish modeling one part of the main point of interest (in the scene it is the main building) and then texture that part to see how it interacts with lighting/mood of the scene. This way I know that I'm on the right track and don't need to change the modeling/texturing approach for the rest of the scene. For example, in this project, one part of the building was fully modeled, then I added the windows, the wooden planks, the textures, and after previewing them in rendered mode I knew that the planks would work out great with such a low polycount and without sculpting, considering the distance they will be visible from and the fact I'd fake depth and shadows with my texture maps.

Combining Megascans and Blender

Quixel Megascans are my go-to for every scene I create! Their library is the best out there plus with Quixel Bridge it's just easy to look for materials that you need and get them at your disposal in no time! When it comes to texturing my models in Blender, using Megascans surfaces is a very easy and simple task. First, I unwrap the models using the smart and quick UV options that Blender offers, then manually tweak some faces and stretches if needed after adding the textures on the objects and quickly previewing them in real-time in Eevee.

Tweaking the materials is also very easy. I often use my own approach of duplicating the albedo texture and adding a few nodes to tweak the saturation, brightness/contrast. Alongside a color ramp node connected to a noise texture, these will give me the option to have some variation that I can review in real-time and keep adjusting to my liking. Sometimes, I use the same technique with the specular/roughness map to add variation to the wetness of the materials and their interaction with light. The next step would be adding decals from the Megascans library to give my models more story and realism.

When it comes to adding 3D assets from the Megascans library into Blender, it's the same simple way of installing the add-on for the software and then hitting Export – and they are ready to be used in your scene. For the textures and materials, whenever I'm using Megascans, I was used to drag-and-dropping the texture maps and connecting them manually in the shader but there's a better and faster way of doing that by using the internal add-on in Blender called Node Wrangler. You just need to enable it once and after that whenever you want to add any texture maps you'll just need to select them and with one click, they will be imported and connected automatically.

Self-Reflection and Future Plans

My biggest takeaway from this scene would be how I approached modeling and texturing in such a big project in a smart and fast way. It took me only a few hours, and I could spend the rest of the time working on my lighting/mood and rendering it. When you work on the same scene for many hours, you might sometimes lose motivation and get distracted by other stuff. This was also the first time I tried to recreate a scene from an image reference and it was quite fun and satisfying to see my own version of that piece.

The next step for me would be to start creating scenes like this one in real-time using UE4, learn the whole process of creating game environments, a proper way of modeling and UVing assets in Blender as well as integrate industry-standard software for texturing (Substance Painter/Designer) in my workflow.

I hope you enjoyed reading this and thank you so much for your time.

Dany Arfan, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Ellie Harisova