Old Ruins (Unreal 5, 2026)
16:9 DX11, cascaded shadow maps, Lumen global tracing for GI. The environment was designed to scale seamlessly between DX11/12.
Fly though using DX12 with software based GI and ray traced shadowing. The project has since been switched to DX11 with more legacy, reliable rendering features.
High poly scan data combined with high poly megascans assets, then retopologized to a more mid poly engine ready mesh and UV unwrapped for texturing in Substance Painter.
Substance Painter texturing. I use a tri-planar fill based approach as it minimizes noticeable texture seams, adding dirt & edge wear mask generators with differeing materials to achieve believable environmental wear and tear.
I like to find real world architectural scans to decimate & texture, as it saves a lot of time compared to modeling entirely by hand.
Waterfall is part of a larger river water mesh, using a basic scrolling UV for normal maps. Waterfall effect is built into river shader.
Node graph for the river shader. There's a lot going on, but the basics are using dot product and world space pixel positioning, the water begins fading to a white color the more it curves, the effect is roughly visible in the viewport sphere.
Much of the ground terrain coverage is either hand placed megascans rocksets, hand placed ground foliage and a custom, basic master terrain shader.
Custom terrain master shader I mentioned earlier. Uses a basic splat mask to allow blending between two textures and two normal maps. Temporallt dithered pixel offset for less harsh seams between terrain and meshes. Parallax offsetting for cheap fake 3D.
Night time setting.
This full environment build created in Unreal Engine 5 was developed as a technical and artistic exploration of scalability, lighting, and classic optimization workflows in a modern renderer, and as a tech demo of sorts for an unannounced indie fantasy RPG.
The scene was built almost entirely from the ground up. Many assets were modeled in Blender, textured in Substance Painter, and supplemented with custom-textured photogrammetry where appropriate. Composition and set dressing were done by hand with a strong focus on natural breakup, layered depth, and believable aging. Vegetation from Quixel Megascans, as well as some ground terrain textures.
A major goal of this project was performance scalability without losing artistic vision. While UE5 offers powerful new systems, I intentionally leaned on proven techniques where they made more sense at scale. The final environment uses carefully tuned traditional LODs instead of Nanite for foliage and mid frequency assets, classic cascaded shadow maps instead of Virtual Shadow Maps, and DirectX 11 for improved stability and performance across a wider range of hardware.
Lighting is fully dynamic using Lumen, with emphasis on long shadows, warm bounce light, and strong time of day mood. Foliage density, shadow contribution, and indirect lighting influence were all hand tuned to balance visual fidelity and frame cost.
This project was as much about problem solving as it was about visuals. It represents a practical, production minded approach to environment art that prioritizes scalability, clarity, and control over relying on every new system by default.
Rendered in real time in Unreal Engine 5.
Tools Used: Unreal Engine 5, Blender, Sketchfab (for photogrammetry high polys), Substance Painter
Thanks for looking!