How to Turn a 2D Concept Into a Colorful & Lively 3D Environment

Save

Copy Link<br>Share

Anastasiia Manaeva

Environment Artist

Interviewed by

Emma Collins

21 July 2026

Anastasiia Manaeva discussed the workflow behind the Matsuri project, explaining how she studied references of traditional Japanese festival floats to make a believable scene and detailing how she achieved the lively atmosphere without adding people.

Introduction<br>Hi! My name is Anastasiia Manaeva, and I am a 3D Environment Artist based in Seattle. My journey into 3D started with character art creation courses. I was fascinated by the process, but over time I realized that creating environments was much closer to what I truly enjoyed. I love building not just individual assets but entire worlds with their own atmosphere and story.<br>To improve my skills, I enrolled at Think Tank Training Centre, where I learned modern environment art workflows. Matsuri became my mentorship project and the largest environment I have created so far. Although I haven't worked in the industry yet, I have spent the last few years creating personal projects to improve both my artistic and technical skills.

Matsuri<br>I found the original concept in the art book Mysterious Scenes from a Dark Fantasy World: Background Illustrations and Scenes by Up-and-Coming Creators. The artwork was created by Yuuri (有里). As soon as I saw it, I immediately wanted to recreate it in 3D. The concept had everything I love. It felt like a small game level that I wanted to explore myself.<br>I could already imagine walking between the food stalls, looking at all the little details, and experiencing the atmosphere. I collected all my references in PureRef, where I organized references for the float's construction, traditional Japanese festivals, architectural details, and props for the market stalls. One of the biggest challenges was that the original illustration only shows the front of the festival float, so I had to design everything that wasn't visible.<br>I reused many elements from the front and imagined what the back would realistically look like if this float existed at a real Japanese summer festival. Another challenge from the very beginning was understanding how such a huge structure could actually work. I spent a lot of time studying references of traditional Japanese festival floats.<br>Although they were much smaller than the one in the concept, they helped me understand how the wooden construction could support such heavy loads. Together with my mentor, we developed a believable structural plan, so the final design would feel grounded in reality while still staying faithful to the original concept. A circular wooden support acts as the core of the structure, with beams extending outward to carry the building's weight.

Modeling<br>Since the concept already had a very strong composition, my goal was to preserve its feeling while making the environment believable in 3D. The illustration immediately draws your attention to the festival float itself, but with so many details, the eye can easily wander without a clear focal point. I wanted to strengthen that focus by leading the viewer's eye toward the large drum in the center of the composition, while allowing the shops and smaller details to gradually reveal themselves.<br>To achieve this, I used atmospheric fog to separate the scene into layers and make the center read brighter and more clearly. I started the blockout directly in Unreal Engine. This helped me quickly understand the overall scale of the float and how all the different structural parts would fit together. Some aspects of the concept were challenging to interpret in terms of scale, so that stage took longer than I initially expected.<br>The architectural elements were built from a small modular kit of wooden parts like pillars, floors, walls sections that could be reused across multiple levels of the float. For the illuminated signs, I used emissive materials in Unreal Engine. Once the blockout was defined, I moved into Maya for detailed modeling. Most assets were created there, while ZBrush was used for organic elements such as the octopus decoration and food props.<br>One unexpectedly difficult part of the project was the Japanese signage. There were many signs throughout the environment, and it was surprisingly easy to get lost among all the different characters. Downloading Japanese fonts and using Maya's text tools made it much easier to create believable signs while maintaining enough visual variety.<br>Because the original concept included many people, I had to find another way to make the environment feel alive without adding characters. I spent a lot of time thinking about how visitors would actually move through the float. I separated different areas with curtains, which were created in Marvelous Designer, and imagined how people could naturally walk through the circular structure.

Retopology and Texturing<br>All hard-surface assets were modeled directly in Maya, where I tried...