BG3 Goblin Camp Scene Postmortem

Originally Posted: Dec 17, 2025

      This project is an interactive game scene recreation inspired by Baldur's Gate 3's goblin camp my team and I are creating for our Game Asset Production class at Chico State. I hold the role of lead texturer and my team consists of Julian Kroeger-Miller as project lead and producer, Els Fouché as lead programmer, and Destiny Smith as lead modeler.

    This post is a postmortem of the entire development process across five one-week sprints.

    My work for this project consisted of two main things: the modular scene assembly and the majority of texturing. I also modeled a few minor props and dis a couple minor VFX in the torches' fire particle effect and the blood decals

Contact Sheet of Textured Props

Sprint 1 In Progress Blockout

    Firstly, I worked on putting together the blockout, which evolved into the final layout, of the modular environment using the templates provided by my wonderful modeler. All throughout this process I continued to import and prefab assets as they were completed, gradually building out our modular kit. It involved a lot of revision and addition since we didn't have a super strong plan for the modular kit yet; a lot of the blockout work involved designing what pieces were needed for the kit. I hadn't had much experience with Unreal Engine before this project either, so I had a lot of learning and adjusting to do, especially when it came to the viewport and file management. 

Models Contact Sheet

    I was also somewhat out of my wheelhouse with this project as I primarily consider myself a programmer. While I'm confident in my 3D art skills for flex work, it was a little daunting be assigned the role of Lead Texturer. My work was going to be one of the most blatant and obvious things the player sees, and it was up to me to do all of the most important pieces. However, while there are definitely a fair few rough parts, I'm overall pretty satisfied with how things turned out. Even though I ended up despairing a bit when I saw how my final textures ended up, especially after importing into Unreal, I think all the pieces of our project put together combine really well. The post processing and scene population both synergize greatly to help cover up some of my textures' shortcomings. I'm definitely the most proud of the dice and my process generating height detail from applying bevels and blurs to the color ID map.

Stone Brick Trim Sheet Color & Normal Maps

    I had turned to Substance Designer to create the main stone brick wall texture, but I'm not completely satisfied with how it turned out; I think it's one of the weakest materials in the project. I had wanted to really capture a unique and game accurate look, better than would have been possible with a pre-made material from outside, but I unfortunately don't think I was able to quite follow through with that. The whole process was quite time consuming and frustrating, too, so I definitely plan on making sure I have a much more thought out process and road to success before attempting similar challenges in the future.

Torches' Fire VFX

    The wood textures for the props also posed a challenge. While I had been mostly happy with them inside Substance Painter, I was sorely disappointed when I implemented them into Unreal. I had tried to add a lot of damage and grime detail which, combined with the lower texel density of the material, resulted in them just looking too noisy. This noisiness meant that instead of looking broken and grubby like I'd intended, it had the opposite effect: they looked too clean and pristine since you couldn't tell the dirt or damage from the regular grain.


    



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