Building the Modular Set
The chapel was assembled from modular pieces first. After the base structure worked, I added unique damage and hand-placed details to break repetition. The core kit included 12 wall pieces, 5 roof modules, 5 loose roof planks, 3 fence pieces, 3 facade pieces, 3 beams, plus individual elements such as the chimney, pillars, door, and stairs. For the surrounding environment, I created 4 trees, 5 bushes, and grass pieces, one Gaea mountain mass, 3 rock props, logs, and roughly a dozen smaller props.
I used two 4K trim sheets and several 4K tileable textures. One trim sheet was mainly for wall and structural surfaces. The second was a hybrid sheet with tileable sections and uniquely sculpted plank textures. Unique props used their own texture set where needed, but most of the chapel stayed trim- and tileable-based to keep the workflow reusable.
The roof needed the most extra work. A clean modular roof looked too uniform, so I layered sculpted planks over the base structure. I made unique damaged planks in ZBrush, then placed them on top of the modular roof to create warping, broken edges, missing sections, and a less predictable silhouette.
I used the same logic on the walls. Some damage was built into modular variants, while other breakups came from decals, loose planks, holes, and hand-placed pieces. This gave me the speed of a modular workflow without making the building look procedural. Small storytelling props pushed the chapel further: crucifixes, horseshoes, ropes, animal skulls, antlers, lanterns, fences, broken planks, and painted symbols.
These details made the structure feel more specific and helped connect the architecture to the world around it. The biggest challenge was keeping the modular logic useful in production, but invisible in the final image. I wanted the kit to be reusable, but I did not want the viewer to feel the repetition.
