Gingerbread Village (2020 Christmas Card Project)

Gingerbread Village (2020 Christmas Card Project)

For my 2020 custom Christmas card, I created a full 3D gingerbread village from the ground up.

I designed and modeled a collection of gingerbread-themed elements including people, animals, houses, vehicles, and trees. Using Unreal Engine 4’s landscape tools, I built the terrain and painted the gingerbread trees directly into the scene as foliage. The entire village was hand assembled in Unreal, where I placed every prop, light, and detail by hand, applying my environment art experience to create a balanced and inviting composition.

My pipeline began in Photoshop, where I sketched rough silhouettes for many of the gingerbread cutouts. These designs were exported as vector files and brought into 3ds Max for modeling. Depending on the shape, I either extruded the paths directly or rebuilt them through standard poly modeling. Each mesh was refined and carefully UV mapped to prepare for texturing.

In Substance Painter, I created custom smart materials for the main surface types such as gingerbread, frosting, and candy, combining smart masks with hand painting to bring out subtle variations in color and surface detail. Once texturing was complete, I imported everything into Unreal Engine 4 and set up materials to handle the baked maps and texture sets.

The final composition was designed to be viewed from a specific camera angle where the red and green tones of Christmas would come together through the lighting. The scene uses green-tinted artificial lights and a soft red sky to capture a sense of warmth and contrast. From the intended viewpoint, these colors work together to frame the village and highlight the surface detail across the materials.

This project brought together the technical side of my environment art workflow with the creative expression of a personal piece. It was a fun challenge to work outside a realistic setting and explore a more stylized direction in both modeling and texturing, while still keeping the materials and lighting grounded enough to feel tangible. Building this scene allowed me to experiment freely and focus on capturing the atmosphere and charm of a handcrafted holiday world.