River Town - Laundry Day (1863)

River Town - Laundry Day is a passion project from Inka Sipola that evolved into a beautiful portfolio piece for our team.
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This project was a chance to explore finding a balance between fantasy and reality. With these large overhanging structures, with storytelling of a simpler life, blended with modern day techniques for games to recreate the classic Laundry Day (Also knows as "Wash Day") painting from 1863 (With medieval or Victorian fantasy characteristics). The project has a mix of hand created, sculpted, and textured assets, with modular building elements, overlaid with tessellated Megascans materials. Almost every material used was altered in some way and customized to fit in with the environment and theme of the artwork.
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The project was completed in early 2025 and due to a busy schedule, we have only now just been able to share it with all of you.
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Some very interesting techniques were used to create tessellation on the assets, before the updated engine versions allowed for in engine tessellation. The assets were created in Blender, where materials were pre-placed onto surfaces and tessellated in Blender after vertex blending was used to hand paint areas of damage, plaster, brick, and other elements scene in the piece.
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The washing brush also uses an age old technique called "Fur Shells" to make it feel as though each bristle of the brush exists in full 3D fashion. While many of the other assets used for things like the wood, barrels, wash bins, chicken coup, and storytelling assets had custom hand sculpting, bakes, and textures to create the remaining assets. Marvelous Designer for the clothes. Some of the wood assets used are from our "Farmlands" Asset pack. The remaining assets are currently not for sale or use outside of our studio.
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Based on the Original Artwork by Christian Friedrich (1861)
https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Wash-day-before-a-small-town--1863/E2955A294D5F144760439E08B492D7C5
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--- Credits ---
Inka Sipola - Artwork planning, project creation, texturing, lighting, art, assets, composition, props, material work, sculpting, cinematics
Jacob Norris - Art Direction, Final Renders, Some Lighting and Post Process work
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Enjoy and thanks for taking a look!
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