While staying true to the original concept, I also wanted to add some personal touches, especially through hand-painted textures combined with detailed Normal Maps to give surfaces more depth and variation.

Another important goal was modularity. I created a large set of modular architecture pieces that allowed me to build multiple unique houses, five in total for this project, but the system is flexible enough to support a wide range of variations.

Scope of Work

This environment involved a full production workflow, starting with creating the landscape and moving through foliage, architecture, materials, and VFX. I built a variety of foliage types to match the stylized theme and created modular architecture with material blending, vertex painting, decals, and custom shaders.

The material work was done in Substance 3D Designer and Painter. I also created a large number of props for set dressing, helping bring the scene to life.

To match the concept’s mood, I built a custom cloud setup and added VFX elements to enhance the atmosphere. The environment is also fully interior-ready, allowing for exploration inside the buildings.

Blockout & Composition

Since the ground in the concept wasn’t flat, I started the blockout by shaping the landscape using Unreal Engine’s landscape sculpting tools. I also set up a simple landscape material early on to help with visual readability during the layout process.

Once the terrain was established, I moved on to blocking out the architecture and props. I created detailed blockout meshes in Blender, especially for the modular pieces I planned to use later. I spent quite a bit of time planning out the modular system during this stage, that way, I could build houses directly from those pieces and immediately see how well everything would fit together. After assembling the buildings, I converted them into blueprints and began populating the scene in UE5.

For props, I used simple geometry provided by Unreal just to get a sense of space and layout. I also applied basic material setups to blockout meshes, mainly to visualize colors and composition without committing to detailed textures too early.

My goal was to match the concept art as closely as possible, and I began with a specific camera angle that aligned with the original artwork. From there, I adjusted the rest of the environment to support that primary view while also ensuring the layout made sense for gameplay.

By the end of the blockout phase, I had a clear vision of the final environment. The modular system was already tested and working well, so the final stage was mostly about replacing the placeholders with finished assets.

Modeling & Modularity

I created a full modular kit based on Leartes Studios’ guidelines. I followed their standard of using a 50 cm grid, with modular part dimensions like 150 cm, 300 cm, and 600 cm. Most of my wall modules, for example, were 300×300 cm, but I also created variations like 150×300 and 600×300 depending on design needs.

The modular set included walls, windows, doors, terraces, wooden pillars, roofs, and stairs — in total, I built around 130 unique pieces. While the houses all share the same design language, each one includes unique elements like custom window and door placements or slightly different proportions. Because of that, I had to create a wide variety of modules, but everything is built to be fully compatible, allowing for unlimited variations and new combinations.

Lighting & Atmosphere

For the lighting, I used Lumen, with the main goal of matching the concept as closely as possible and achieving soft, layered lighting throughout the scene. I kept the setup pretty simple: a directional light with a warm tone and low intensity, an HDRI-based skylight with slightly bluish light, and a sky sphere to help with the overall atmosphere.

To get soft shadows, I adjusted the shadow filter sharpness to 0.16 and set the contact shadow length to 0.06, which helped create that soft, painterly feel I was aiming for. I also used exponential fog with a light density and a bluish tint, and enabled volumetric fog to help with depth and mood.

For post-processing, I used some subtle color grading, along with a few tweaks to the toe and white clip settings to get better contrast without losing the stylized softness. I also placed a rim light to help shape the scene a bit more.