Introduction

My name is Anastasia Gorban, and I’m a Level & Lighting Artist specializing in Unreal Engine 5. When I was at school, games felt almost magical to me, something that is impossible to replicate. But at some point, I realized there’s no secret magic behind them. They’re made by people who are simply more experienced than I was. I started digging into how games are actually built: the techniques, pipelines, and roles that exist in game development.

Before that, I was simply an admirer with zero technical knowledge. One video interview with a Level Artist from Pathologic 2 inspired me more than anything else, because it showed the real artist’s workflow and removed the mystery around the job. I had tried starting with pure modeling a couple of times before in Cinema 4D and Maya, but never felt real inspiration there.

The moment I discovered game engines, especially Unreal Engine, I knew this was exactly what I had always imagined myself doing. That realization came at the perfect time in 2022, when UE5 was becoming powerful yet surprisingly beginner-friendly. I began with simple tutorials and learned everything step by step on my own. Later, I gave myself a serious boost by completing a test task for the wonderful studio Scans Factory. The scene got great feedback on YouTube and valuable advice on Reddit, which kept me motivated.

I joined the team as a Level and Environment Artist and gradually expanded my skills into technical and cinematic fields. It was a pilot project for our team, so not everything was perfect, but the technical growth I experienced there was enormous. Seeing the film win multiple awards, including several Telly Awards and a Webby Honoree, felt incredibly rewarding.

The Eternal Bridge Project

My main motivation for the Eternal Bridge project was to test myself. I wanted to see how much I had actually grown as an artist and how well I could create a conceptual, story-driven environment. At the same time, I wanted to push myself into lighting more, especially physically based lighting.

I find a strong inspiration in the medieval fantasy aesthetic, and I was drawn to something more grounded and monumental, like the early medieval castles and fortresses in Georgia and the Caucasus: massive, heavy, almost brutal stone structures with strict geometric forms, thick walls, built to last and to impress with sheer scale and solidity.

Another strong inspiration came from discovering Luminism, a 19th-century American painting style, best represented in the works of Albert Bierstadt. It’s all about the dramatic light and shadow contrast and the way light seems to radiate from within the scene. I wanted to bring this mystical and adventurous feeling into my fantasy world.

Arches and bridges are some of the strongest cultural symbols we have. They represent passage, transition, connection between two worlds, hope, and the unknown all at once. I knew that using such a strong archetypal shape would make the image instantly captivating.

Blockout

I love playing with scale and distance. I wanted the viewer to feel that the bridge and the castle are enormous, that there are several layers of depth between the foreground and the far mountains, so that the structure looks even more imposing because of how far away it sits in the scene.

I started by placing and locking the camera first. For this piece, I wanted a strong, static, poster-like composition. Then comes the blockout, and I usually keep it deliberately simple by using only primitive shapes to quickly establish scale, proportions, and the feeling of distance from the camera.

In the end, this project pushed me to take a more disciplined approach to lighting. The biggest difference was that I worked entirely with real physical values and used only Unreal’s native systems from start to finish. The biggest insight is that no matter how deep you dive into physical values, your eyes and artistic taste must always have the final word. Numbers are an excellent starting point, but they are never the goal.

Rendering & Post

The rendering process for this piece was quite simple. I created a short cinematic sequence with a slowly moving camera and the Echo character, then rendered everything using Movie Render Graph. I find this pipeline introduced in 5.4 much more convenient and flexible than the old Movie Render Queue presets. I had recently done extensive R&D on the Movie Render Graph pipeline for layered rendering, which was published in the Unreal community, so I was already very comfortable with it.

Because I wanted the final image to rely mostly on the lighting I built in-engine, I rendered everything in a single beauty pass without any extra layers or heavy compositing. To stabilize the render, I used a few console variables, and to get a sharper result, I increased spatial samples to 64.

Conclusion

This project took me about two weeks, working 4-5 hours a day. A big part of that time was spent watching workshops, reading Unreal documentation, and studying physically based lighting theory. The main challenge was not to get swept up in theory. There was so much technical information that at times I had to stop myself from watching yet another video and actually apply what I had just learned.

Looking back at my early projects, I clearly see a few things that have helped me grow the most and changed how I approach my work. Fake it till you make it. Sometimes, the technically “wrong” value, a completely unrealistic scale, or random material settings suddenly give exactly the feeling you’re looking for. Don’t be afraid to break the rules if your eyes say “yes”.

Tell a story, always ask yourself: What happened here? Who walked these walls? Why does this place feel the way it does? When the environment starts to tell its own little story, the lighting stops being just a tool. And most importantly, learn to trust your eyes as the final judge. You can study physical values, read documentation for days, and still end up with a technically correct but emotionally dead image.

At the end of the day, numbers are just a great starting point. Your taste and your feeling is what really matter. At the end of this interview, I’d love to share a few resources that helped me a lot on my journey and that I still come back to:

• Karim Yasser’s clear and practical videos on PBL
• Arthur Tasquin’s articles and video on PBL, as well as the amazing toolbox, PBL Database
• A compelling article on PBL principles
• William Faucher’s channel with tons of valuable breakdowns and tips
• Josh Toonen’s incredible channel