A personal environment project built in Unreal Engine 5. The goal was to create a dense, lived-in medieval town with a fully hand-crafted asset library — every building, prop and piece of vegetation modelled and textured from scratch.
The pipeline covered modular architecture, tileable stone and wood materials, hand-placed ivy splines, Lumen-based lighting for both day and night scenarios, and a Sequencer cinematic pass to show the scene in motion.
Two camera angles showing the warm late-afternoon lighting pass, followed by the full Sequencer flythrough.
The same scene after switching to the night lighting rig — Lumen handles the warm emission from the windows and lanterns against the cool moonlit sky.
A breakdown of the key art direction decisions: color ID map showing how few materials cover the whole scene, composition lines guiding the eye toward the focal building, and the black-and-white pass to validate contrast and focus areas.
Surface variation across the scene is driven by vertex paint rather than unique textures. A single material blends between clean brick, plastered sections and heavy weathering — the videos show the real-time transitions as the weights are painted.
A look at the scene mid-production — showing the asset layout, lighting iteration and dressing before the final polish pass.
The full set of buildings and modular props built for the scene. Every piece shares the same material palette so they mix freely without seams.
Hand-sculpted ivy splines that conform to any surface, a full brick creation workflow from real-world reference to Nanite displacement, material sphere showcases for all surface types, and the wood beam high-poly detail set using UV channel 2 normal blending.
