Creating A Hand-Painted Fully Unlit Scene In Maya, ZBrush & Substance 3D Painter

Introduction

My name is Rémy Lauret. I’ve been working in 3D for five years, with three years of professional experience. I’m currently part of the team at Gameloft Montreal, working on Disney Dreamlight Valley. I attended an art school where I learned the fundamentals, but after graduating, I dedicated a lot of time to personal projects to explore different techniques and workflows.

About The Fish Handpaint Project

First, I usually start by looking for designs online on platforms like ArtStation or Pinterest. When I find a concept I truly love, I dive into researching the style and gathering references to determine the direction I want to take.

For this project, I was inspired by a concept created by Eriketi Koulouri, which you can find on her ArtStation here. My main goal for this project was to enhance my hand-painted skills while avoiding the use of PBR techniques or baked lighting information.

Blockout

For the composition, I wanted to stay true to the original concept, so I began with the blocking phase. My workflow is fairly straightforward: I start by creating the base shapes in Maya.

Once the base is complete, I like to move directly into ZBrush to sculpt and add details that will provide valuable information for texturing, like the crack or the wood pattern.

For those patterns, I usually use orb crack mix with polish for the bevels. I enjoy this workflow because creating a high-poly model ensures that all the details are captured during the baking process, making texturing much easier and more efficient.

After finishing all the small details and adding normal map information, I proceed to bake everything. I typically do the baking directly in Substance 3D Painter, using an exploded bake setup for cleaner and more precise results.

Texturing & Lighting

After the bake, I typically start by creating a simple base in Substance 3D Painter, like the example for the wall. For this project, I wanted to go further by building a detailed hand-painted base directly in Substance 3D Painter, using light, curvature, and AO information for guidance.

I also added a Grunge Map, specifically Jan Wyss’s map, which really helped introduce color variation. 

Here’s an image showing the three stages of my texturing process with the wall:

In the second phase, I used 3D Coat to refine the textures, add hand-painted lighting, and include extra details.

For the lighting, I aimed to create an unlit scene. The detailed base I built in Substance 3D Painter was a huge help. After that, I went back and forth between Photoshop and 3D Coat to refine the layers. Sometimes, it’s easier for me to adjust a layer in Photoshop, and 3D Coat makes it simple to sync layers with external software by using the “Sync All Layers with an External Soft” option in the edit menu. Here is before after the shadow and the small lighting effects like light dots, etc: 

Rendering  

For the final assemblage, I just kept the original concept. For the rendering, I usually use Marmoset Toolbag. I didn’t make many adjustments in Marmoset — just increased the saturation, tweaked the contrast, and added a subtle outline.

To create the outline, I simply duplicated the mesh and inverted the normals.

You can see the before and after with the render passes:

Summary

This project took me about a month of my free time, and it was a lot of fun to work on. My main goal was to create a fully unlit scene without using any lighting, focusing as much as possible on Substance 3D Painter. It was my first time attempting this approach, and I’m really happy with the result. I learned so much about the hand-painting process, and I feel it will be much easier to do similar projects in the future.

My advice would be to work on personal projects and experiment with different techniques. There are also plenty of free tutorials on YouTube that can be incredibly helpful, so take advantage of them!

Rémy Lauret, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine