My work has always been inspired by natural scenes. For my first Unreal 3 environment, I wanted to explore an alternative to the futuristic, metal aesthetic of many games.

This was a remake of an earlier environment project, and using the Unreal 3 engine forced me to rethink several key elements. Lighting and. composition played a key role, and the symmetry of the terrace design called for the purposeful offsetting of other assets.

One of my main challenges was finding an appropriate texel density. Thankfully, Unreal's robust toolset let me adjust my texture densities for best effect. The use of normal maps, parallax and linear interpolation shaders, as well as subsurface scattering, helped me bring quality to assets requiring limited mesh. The use of instancing, as well as the use of LOD meshes, helped make the scene work for both distance and close range viewing.