Thursday July 30th, 2026
Old Entrance
About This Piece
Old Entrance is mainly an exercise of exploring texture sculpting in Blender. The visual objective is a somewhat stylized "hand-painted" 3D art style characterized by soft, chunky forms and exaggerated stone and wood textures that prioritize artistic charm over photorealism.
Texture Sculpting
Once the blocked-in geo is in place, I went piece by piece, subdividing each one with enough sculpting resolution, choosing the texture and setting the sculpting mode to 'Anchored' (meaning click-dragging creates a center point and mouse movement dictates the sculpt area radius) to establish the desired sculpted texture effect. I also made use of some 'Orb' and other sculpting brushes for general rock deformations/cracks! This high resolution model is in turn used for baking to the low resolution version within Substance Painter.
Texturing
I leverage Substance Painter's extensive library of base materials as efficient foundations. For the door, I selected a damaged wood base and layered it with grunge textures and paint layers. I manually painted the edge highlights and deeper structural details such as uneven
wooden gaps to achieve a more organic, hand-crafted aesthetic than what standard generators provide.
I look for darker patterns in the base stone materials and paint subtle indented height channel blotches on them to create pockmarks.
I applied this same methodology to the stonework, enhancing a base stone material with procedural grime layers and hand-painted highlights. I look for darker patterns in the base stone materials and paint subtle indented height channel blotches on them to create pockmarks.
This enables more organic pitting and worn surfaces (which further exemplifies why I prefer this method to relying on worn edge generators in situations like this as it offers more detail and control).
Additionally, during the retopology stage,
I tend to give the low poly mesh more face detailing so that they hug the larger bevels and deformation of the higher resolution sculpted mesh. Sure, it adds a bit more triangles, but it also adds more detail and the aforementioned hand painted edge highlights (along with deeper shaded recessed areas)
further accentuates these forms more clearly!
Software Used
Blender
Substance Painter
Marmoset Toolbag