Learn How to Create a Hand-Painted 3D Cottage Using 3DCoat & Maya

Introduction

My name is Alex Creamer, I got into 3D art when I was around 12 years old. I started with Lightwave 3D before jumping into Maya and 3ds Max. I learned modeling mostly from YouTube tutorials and the big Autodesk textbooks back then.

I knew I didn't want to make characters and was more interested in world-building, so I followed the environment route instead. In my career so far, I've contributed to World of Warcraft as an Environment Artist at Blizzard and helped ship Dragonflight and The War Within.

Inspiration & References

I initially started this project during a hand-painted class with the amazing artist Phillip Zhang. Working with references for this was an interesting challenge. The original reference is by the wonderful illustrator Kemineko. I quickly realized while starting the modeling that I had to modify the perspective and the models to get the desired look based on the concept. For example, to get certain planes to read more clearly, I had to warp the shapes and heavily stylize them to the final angle of the camera.

Since I knew this project was going to be large, I found that breaking it down into large chunks (such as foreground, midground, and background) helped me mentally understand it. Once I broke those down, I started breaking them into subchunks, such as individual buildings, a bridge, stairs, trees, etc.

Asset Production Pipeline

Once I had an idea of how I would approach it after doing my 2D subdivision of Kemineko's concept, I started building it in 3ds Max. The Shift brush is one of my favorite tools to use in the program. It helped with some nudging of certain elements. This tool has a variety of useful settings to nudge models more organically instead of individual vert pushing or using soft selection.

I also used the lattice modifiers quite a bit to stylize the buildings. I didn't want many straight lines and aimed to have almost every edge tapered or slightly bent to prevent stillness.

I approached vegetation in a simple way. I would paint the texture of a branch with leaves or a large leaf for a fern, and then I'd cut it out of a 3D plane and add edge loops for bending and rotating. As for the tree, I wanted it to have a gradient of light going across the canopy, so I approached it in more of a 2D illustrative way rather than a traditional 3D approach.

Retopology & Unwrapping

This wasn't sculpted or baked, so there wasn't a need for a high-resolution version to retopologize. As for unwrapping, I knew I wanted large sections to be UV'ed and named appropriately. I would then group all the chunks and assets that shared a UV sheet together and name the group that UV number. This helped me mentally understand which UV sheets went to which section of the project. Simple but effective!

I used a combination of 3ds Max and Maya UV tools for basic mapping and layout, making sure to straighten as many shells as possible to avoid wasting UV space.

Texturing

I initially brought this into 3DCoat, which is a great tool for painting props in 3D to see results quickly. I've used it off and on for years! I was able to establish an overall atmosphere and vibe using 3DCoat, but I realized I would need to combine it with traditional Photoshop painting on the texture itself to get into the nooks and crannies of each asset.

A quick tip for 3DCoat, if you want Photoshop-accurate pixel sharpness, is to turn off linear texture filtering under the View settings. This prevents auto-generated softness.

I ended up changing the colors from the concept to try something different, so I didn't worry too much about likeness after the initial modeling was finished.

Lighting

Since this project was entirely meant to be hand-painted, including the lighting, I didn't want any software-generated lighting. For blooms and sun rays, I would add a variety of alpha planes around the image with simple alphas painted onto them. In Maya's texture options, I would adjust the alpha color and exposure settings to get the amount of bloom/glow desired. One of the biggest challenges was painting all the shadows and shadow directions.

Conclusion

I worked on this off and on for a very long time, and I learned a lot while building it! Aside from painted lighting being one of the biggest challenges, another was working with the values of every asset. I didn't want certain assets to stand out, but I also didn't want them to read as flat. Balancing the values while trying to create a believably lit environment was something I had to keep going back to and micro-adjusting many times.

As for learning tutorials, I think there are a good number of hand-painted tutorials out there on YouTube now! I'd also recommend people check out the Handpainter's Guild, which is a community of hand-painted-dedicated artists.

Thank you for listening and checking out the project!

Alex Creamer, Environment Artist