Creating Painterly-Style Lily Pads In Maya, UE & Substance 3D Painter

Introduction

Hi, I’m Lars Rongen, a third-year Environment Artist studying at Breda University of Applied Sciences, specializing in vegetation. I started learning 3D art at my first school back in 2018. I graduated in 2022 and continued a second study (BUAS) to increase my knowledge of the craft.

During my studies, I have learned software like Maya, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Substance 3D Painter, and Designer, among many others. During my third year, I renewed my passion for painting, and I decided I wanted to paint digitally for my next project as much as possible. This ended up being my Lily Lake project.

During my time here at BUAS, I have done many solo projects, which you can find here. But one that blinks out is my team project for the game Pizzapocalypse. This remains one of my biggest achievements, especially since I was a co-lead for the art department. If you want to play the game, it’s on Steam!

About The Lily Lake Project

Like many of us at the time, I was watching Arcane when it was released, and there was this specific scene with these beautiful lily pads. I immediately grabbed my phone and started taking pictures of my TV screen. I told myself that would be my next project.

I brainstormed about how I was going to tackle this and decided I wanted to at least reference the painterly style Arcane has. So, I picked up my iPad and started drawing foliage that I wanted to make. 

So, I gathered some reference images from the series and wanted to have my own twist on it. I started drawing the base-color texture in Procreate, still keeping in mind that I wanted to make a normal map later on. The base-color texture got iterated upon a lot. I started with just a couple of lily pads in Maya. I would draw the base color, have an alpha mask to cut out any excess of the texture, and use those in Maya to create the shape of the lily pads.

After cutting the shapes out of a plane in Maya, the mesh doesn’t need UVing since you used a plane to cut it from. After that, I went into Maya and placed my lily pads around to create a nice composition and settled on making a nice wallpaper piece.

I quickly moved over to Unreal Engine since that’s where I like set dressing and rendering the most. This was a huge step visually. During this time, I still hadn’t made a normal map. I briefly went into Substance 3D Painter to test out if the lily pads would look better with a painted normal map on them. Conclusion: they didn’t. I decided to give them flat normals afterward, really keeping the focus on the drawn base-color texture.
 
Secret? Uhm, the main thing I stayed focused on was that I set up the camera angle first. From what you can see, there are so many faces on the pillar meshes that you don’t see, and I have decided not to even UV them. For the pillars, I just planar UV’d it from the front angle, and that gave me a nice outline to paint on top. I didn’t need more to make it look nice!

Another little thing that might surprise people is that the caustics you see in the water are actually just a decal that I placed underneath the cube that has the water material on it. This decal has multiple panner nodes to make it wobbly and move very slowly.

Summary

I think the biggest challenge was to have both pillars and lily pads match nicely in style. I have the tendency to deviate from the original reference. But after much iteration on the pillars, they ended up matching quite nicely. I worked on this project in a span of ten weeks, around forty hours of work, in between school projects.

Some advice for beginner 3D Artists would be to do what you like most. There will be plenty of tasks you will need to do that you don’t necessarily like, but if you have some time left and feel creative, do something that you like! Try to keep it fun; this will also give you the boost to keep on working on it, and the result will be much nicer, people can tell. 

Lars Rongen, Environment/Vegetation Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine