Art Spotlight: Tree House

About me

Hi! my name is Weilu, I am a 3D artist from China. I have been working in the game industry for five years. During this time, most of my work was hand-drawn models. This is my first attempt at creating a work using the PBR workflow. I had hoped that PBR would allow me to express my ideas more creatively. This is a brand new experience.

About Tree House

I saw this tree house concept design on Artstation, from a great artist named Jourdan Tuffan.

At first sight I liked how cute it was, like a secret base for children. Its appearance reminds me of many interesting things when I was a child.

Production process

I made a low poly version in Maya, and the rope part was done by creating a “helix” model and then using the “Rotate” tool in the Surfaces panel. Once I created the leaf part, I had to consider the texture size problem. Everything is in one UV, and the whole texture is set to 2048×2048.

In order to make the high poly model in ZBrush, I made each component independently.

After the high poly model was created, I used the “decimation master” to export the high poly model into Maya. In Maya I joined the structure of the original rope part. Finally, I used Mental Ray to bake normals and occlusion maps. I really like the Mental Ray baked occlusion. This texture can be overlaid on the color later. It creates a real film graininess. The only bad thing is that it takes a long time to process.

After the model phase is completed, I went on to the map drawing stage. I used Substance Painter to make the texture. I did the texture creation by processing the material I brought. I often use lray rendering to check the texture rendering and completion.

Finally, I posted the model to Sketchfab via Substance Painter. In Sketchfab, I tested a lot of values in order to get satisfactory results. I added three lights, so that the leaves looked beautifully reflected in the sun. I used a blue light for the dark parts of the model.