For this scene, I combined procedural techniques with hand-painted textures to create the illusion of an overall painterly look. Since textures usually add realism, I limited them to specific areas I wanted to emphasize, so they wouldn’t overpower the brushstrokes.
I started exploring shaders to speed up my workflow and came across the Painterly Normal Shader by Detox. I made slight adjustments to tailor it to my art style: adding the ability to use vertex colors, smoothing the Voronoi noise so it blends better around skin textures, and adding simple floats to certain categories to give me more control over each material.
Adding subtle cloth animation to the laundry meshes and leaves. I kept the motion minimal, just enough to bring the scene to life.
Using Blender’s built-in Meta Rig allows me to pose the characters easily. I also added extra hair bones in case I want the hair to sway in the wind later.
Since the characters would be seen up close, I hand-painted their textures in Substance to give them more detail. It also gave me precise control over their colors and highlights.
Some background props for the scene. I sped up the process by relying mostly on vertex colors and only hand-painting UVs where I needed more detail. Since this was created for a video demo rather than an in-game environment, I didn’t prioritize clean topology or poly optimization.
This is the general layout of the scene. In this shot, I’ve already replaced most of the greyboxes. I placed the props in specific locations so they remain within the camera’s view. Since this was created for a demo rather than gameplay, I didn’t need to fully decorate the entire landscape.