Learn to Make Cozy House in the Forest

Introduction

Hey there! I’m Elisa Binz, I’m a 23 years old 3D Environment Artist student at Artside School, currently in my last year of studies!.

I’ started doing 3D in 2019 at my previous art school. I noticed really quickly that 3D was the field that I felt connected with from the start! So, after 2 years, I decided to join Artside in 2021 to level up my skills and focus only on what I loved when joining the 3D Environment Art specialization in 2023. I've learned a lot during my years at Artside, through all of the classes and mentors we had!

For now, we haven’t started the production of our group project with 5 of my classmates, but the best is yet to come!

House in the Forest

At the end of May 2024 at Artside, our director came to us to talk about what was going to be the final project of our 3rd year: creating a beauty corner in 4 weeks!

I had a lot of ideas and concept art in mind: a grounded boat, a pirate’s tavern, props from Horizon Forbidden West, and… The House in the Forest.

I absolutely loved the look of this concept made by Keen Art; it had such an “I want to live there” vibe. I also really wanted to focus on wood, which isn’t the easiest material to create. Since this milestone happened right after our foliage class, which I really enjoyed, it was the perfect project for me!

Before starting the production, it was time for me to gather some references! I needed photos from real life and an artistic direction to follow for the textures and the sculpt.

For the sculpts, I chose to follow Santa Monica’s God of War’s art direction, especially the models done by Jon Arellano. For the textures, I wanted a semi-realistic look like in The Last of Us. After gathering my references, it was time for production!

Since I already had my concept, it was easy to block everything out. At the very beginning, I made a few different blocks on Blender that I used as a meter-based modular kit to quickly find the proportions of my scene. I added some trees from Quixel to help me with the lighting from the very beginning. With the help and feedback from Lionel Cregut, our mentor, I was able to quickly have the whole scene blocked out.

After my blockout was finished, I decided to sculpt and texture one of my assets to quickly find my render target inside of my scene. With a nice base of texturing on my first asset, I made a smart material to be able to quickly apply this base on all of my assets and see the look in Unreal Engine in real time.

Here are all of my sculpts, all done in ZBrush using the Trim Smooth Border brush with a square alpha for the edges, the Dam Standard, the Mallet Fast, and the Move brushes for all of the wood carving, as well as some alphas from JROTools and the Orb Flatten Edge with a square alpha.

Based on the references I gathered, I made a bunch of different vegetation to dress up my whole scene. I have a few tree variations, but also some ground foliage, such as some grass, fern, and a small banana tree, that I placed all around the house to create this forest. I made all of the foliage using SpeedTree and Megascans for the textures.

Retopology

Since my main objective here was to have a cool shot for my scene, I didn’t want all of my objects to be very low-poly. So for the assets I sculpted, I made a decimate that wasn’t too high: depending on the object, it was from 250 triangles to 1000. For assets I didn’t sculpt, or not fully, the topology was very simple, for example, here’s my door that has both sculpted and non-sculpted parts.

Unwrapping my UVs on a decimated model is actually quite simple. Since the decimated version includes the bevels, I don’t need to cut every side of my wood planks! I just need to add a Weighted Normals modifier to make the normals clean, and – poof! – all done. By cutting this way, I could avoid having a lot of UV shells. After making all of my cuts, I just straightened my UVs to make all of my islands straight.

In order to make clean UVs, I used a few add-ons in Blender, including TexTools, Texel Density Checker, and UVPackmaster.

I also used the technique of involving half-maps to optimize all of my texture maps while keeping the same texel density on every object. I’ve explained my entire UV workflow in this free tutorial.

I used Marmoset Toolbag 4 to bake all of my assets, which allowed me more control than baking in Substance 3D Painter. Here’s an amazing tutorial on baking using Marmoset, made by my best friend, if you have never used it.

Texturing

Since most of my assets were part of a modular kit, I couldn’t add in my textures such things as position gradients or really specific texturing that was going to be noticeable.

As my sculpts gave more volume to my wood, I could use a Substance 3D Painter wood material as a base. Good blending allowed me to have a micro normal and some soft color variation. Another layer of wood grain helped me get some more nice details in my normal map.

After my base, I added a few color variations to get closer to my concept’s colors by getting blue, orange, and green tints.

Afterward, I added scratches based on where my wood planks would be placed: for example, the ground planks have some directional scratches for the natural wear of the assets.

Finally, I added ambient occlusion where needed, as well as a soft curvature. Let’s not forget to sharpen to make everything a bit less blurry!

If I had just used my textures like this in the engine, it would’ve worked, but it would’ve made every texture more recognizable. So, with the help of Kostia Perry, I added a random color variation based on the object's position. It helped me get some slight variations that made everything look more natural.

Also, the house wasn’t supposed to be brand new, so adding some dirt was definitely needed. Using UE5’s distance field was the best way for me to achieve a nice AO dirt on my scene and make all of my assets work together as a whole.

Composition

Creating the full scene in Unreal Engine was pretty fun! In order to make the scene look good while using my modules, I had to cut them using booleans so they don’t appear too long or don’t clip with my windows or the door! I also tried to add some rotation to some of them, such as the fence, to add a bit more storytelling.

This was the look of my scene when I decided to add some grass growing in between my planks, as well as some flowers near the front door. It really helped to make the house feel more real. Later on, I added some more details, such as foliage debris on the ground. Such small detail makes the whole scene feel more alive.

When it was time to texture the sign on the door and the plates nailed into the two fence’s poles, I suddenly had the idea of writing stuff related to the class we had! In order to thank our mentor, Lionel Cregut, for all of his feedback throughout the whole project, I decided to write a little thank you note on the left! On the right, I put my name as well as the school’s logo since it was done at Artside. For the sign on the door, I’ve misspelled Lionel’s name, just as a kid would do on a treehouse!

Adding the ivy also helped a lot in getting the result I wanted! Before getting the final ivy layout, I had to go through some tests and I eventually made the final model in SpeedTree. The first version was only on a beam, which was a bit boring! So, after a few iterations, I finally came up with a cool shape that didn’t cover the ground and allowed our eyes to focus directly on the door and not be blocked by the ivy. Here are the steps I went through before getting the final result!

I feel all of these little details added a lot to the scene, and I’m really glad I added them all!

Lighting

The lighting in this environment was a really tricky part. It wasn’t just putting a classic directional light.

I had to work a lot with my foliage placement in parallel to changing my lighting settings in order to get the correct mood. And I had to do it fast! That’s why I used trees from Megascans at first. It helped me quickly capture the lighting and the mood from the very beginning, even though it was bound to change.

I did a lot of iterations with parameters from my directional light, such as the rotation, the temperature, and the intensity. I also wanted the lighting to be as realistic as it could be. The obvious solution was to use ray tracing. After turning it on, I increased the number of rays to get a better shadow resolution. It really helped me to get the final look of the scene.

The fog and the sky light were also important assets to the scene. I went through various colors for my sky light, from yellow to a more blueish hue that was going to be caught in my fog, besides only bouncing in the shadows.

My post-process parameters in-engine were pretty simple: I removed auto-exposure, kept the same lighting 24/7, and used the Ray Lighting Mode to get better reflections on my windows.

For the final image, I went into Photoshop for some more post-processing. With the Unreal Engine’s Scene Depth render pass, I was able to create a cinematic focus effect to refocus the attention on the house. I also added a vignette to avoid focusing on the outer part of the environment.

And – tada! Here’s the final result!

Conclusion

This project took me a total of 4 weeks, even though I spent a bit of time afterward reworking it to get it ready for my socials! It didn’t feel as long, and it was really amazing to see the progress of this project day after day.

I would say the main challenge was getting the overall mood and making everything work well together. Sculpting wood was also a challenge, it’s not a material I’ve sculpted a lot before, so it was the perfect time for me to learn how to do it. I had to be careful not to make it too stylized, especially with the bevels. It was a really great exercise for all of this!
I also learned more about SpeedTree and how to make foliage, whether it was trees, small plants, ground foliage, or a climbing plant such as ivy!

I really want to thank Lionel Cregut for all of his feedback and advice on my piece! I also want to thank Florian Devos and Michael Gerard for their feedback and help. And obviously, all of my classmates, for all the fun we had while creating each one of our pieces!

Thank you so much for reading this article! I really hope it can help you figure out how to set up your next project. Here are my socials if you’re interested in my other works or want to connect.

Elisa Binz, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine