Artist details modular material pipeline behind a UE5 Baldur's Gate 3-inspired temple

Mandar Warde, a Material Artist on Caterpillar's CAT Visual team, has shared a production breakdown of Shar Temple in an interview with 80 Level. The project is his own take on the Gauntlet of Shar from Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3, not a one-to-one recreation. It was his second mentorship project with Jonathan Benainous at Vessel Forge, and he set himself strict deadlines to make it feel like production work.

The core idea was to build the whole space as a material system. Before modeling, Warde sorted every surface into trims, tileables or uniques, and planned his trim sheets around that. He blocked out in Blender using close to real-world measurements, then rebuilt the blockout as a modular kit of arches, columns and wall sections. The kit was mapped to a single texel density, based on a 2K texture covering a 200 × 200 cm grid, which works out to 1024 px/m. Tileable surfaces use triplanar projection in the shader so they are effectively mapped to world scale.

For props, he sculpted three candle clusters and the skulls in ZBrush and baked them in Substance 3D Painter. Every candle in the scene is an instance of those three meshes, each under 500 tris. Banner meshes were kept simple, with the detail in the textures, and the carpet used a cloth simulation instead of hand-modeled folds. The red vines were grown with Polygonflow's Dash plug-in, which let him control spread and density in the engine so the growth follows the architecture.

Twenty-eight procedural materials built in Substance 3D Designer carry the environment, while hero props such as banners, doors and candles were textured in Substance 3D Painter. Tileables are all 2K, and the engine setup uses ORM-packed masks alongside base color and normal. Warde worked in three passes: about one week for early versions of all 28 materials, about three weeks for detail, and about a week and a half for polish.

The floor is the hero surface and is made of several layered materials, including hex tiles, a sundial and a trim sheet, so one layer can change without rebuilding the others. Warde says tile cracking was one of the most complicated parts. He found that force on a tile usually arrives at an angle, so pieces shift tangentially and layer over each other rather than lifting straight up. His graph tracks missing chips across the marble, limestone and gold inlay materials, and ends with a PBR metallic validation step that he calls the most critical in his pipeline.