Welcome back, everyone! In the last blog, I covered how I started planning my environment mood and the first pass on my art blockout.

As discussed before, the city I'm going for is "Toulouse" or "The Pink City" as we call it in France, primary using bricks and building lime for its buildings, decorated with stone and brick trims.

I first started with a very basic brick tileable and stone trim to go along with my art blockout pass. I tried spending as little time as I could doing them to quickly throw my textures into my environment, see how they looked and played around with the base albedos mainly to make them fit with the mood I was going for.

On a previous project I worked on, I used to spend way too much time noodling around with my texture, exporting, importing over and over without ever being satisfied. That's why I really wanted to be quicker this time and go to the essential shapes and colors I wanted.

I first created a base normal map in Substance Designer then hand-painted normal edges in Photoshop creating this very easy and cheap stylized look to my trim.

For the brick tileable, I first inspired myself from the one seen in Colloseo, an Overwatch map set in Rome, then I tried matching my references and the color mood and variation I was looking for.

I also created a blend version for my brick, mixing it with plaster and an overlay color allowing myself to change the albedo of the plaster depending on the building.

And here is the result after finishing my blend mask and color overlays in Unreal Engine:

The overlay colors are set on a secondary uv channel, layering my base albedo color.

The rest of my textures are pretty much following the same base workflow. Just quickly putting shapes and albedos together and refining overtime after importing them, keeping a consistent stylization and albedo values so everything looks cohesive together and don't clash styles.

If you'd like me to cover anything else, let me know in the comments. 🙂
See you next time!

Hey everyone! I recently started a new environment on Unreal and I wanted to share with you my thought process and work in this first blog post.

This environment is based on a city in South of France called Toulouse (aka. The Pink City), known for the use of brick and building lime giving it this major pink mood. 🧱

I went there back in April 2023 for a week and gathered a few references, but one street stood out for me.
Now in winter, truly missing the summer vibes, I decided to work on this simple quiet street and try reproducing it in a stylised look.

I really liked the look of this narrow street, slightly curved and hinting that there's more after the turn at the end, that it's not a deadend.
This street is clearly hiding more life and gardens behind those facades and buildings, it's something I wanna capture as well.

It would also be a good opportunity for me to implement foliage here and there. I've never done foliage for now so it would make it a good excuse to start learning. 

I jumped in Unreal Engine 5, quickly came out with a blockout following the same composition and flow, and the mood instantly clicked for me.

Then I went straight to the art blockout to further plan how I would approach this environment in the simplest way, how I could re-use buildings to fill my composition without producing too many unique ones.

In total, I'm gonna be using four main buildings, one arch filler and one unique facade, each buildings sharing components for windows and doors.

From the get-go, I knew I was gonna need some trims in this environment to frame my buildings and add some color variation, so I defined their shapes during the art blockout stage as well.

I'm excited to show you in the next blog my first tileables and trims textures I've produced for this new environment!
At the moment of writing, I'm already at a stage where I got blends, windows sheets and trims ready. I can't wait to post more as I'm truly loving working on this street 😁🤘

Thanks for reading and see you next blog! ✨