Nore Pollentier, a 19-year-old environment art student at Howest DAE, spent six weeks in a Sierra Division Academy mentorship recreating a small street in Ankara in Unreal Engine. It is a portfolio piece, so the framing is promotional — but the order of operations is a clean template, and the reasoning is stated rather than assumed.

The project starts from target studios, not from an idea:

  • Picked IO Interactive and MachineGames for their realistic, real-world-based environments; when IO had little public material, the pipeline research came from MachineGames artist talks.
  • What those talks surfaced as priorities: material creation, modularity, sculpting, and matching the real location.
  • Chose an existing street found on Pinterest over an invented concept, so composition was already solved and effort could go into realism. Reverse image search led to the exact spot on Google Maps for proportions from multiple angles.
  • Reference grew throughout: PureRef boards, plus a habit of putting a scene screenshot next to the reference and playing “find the differences” — a cheap self-review loop worth stealing.
  • Deliberate deviation budget: “even for a realistic piece, I still choose not to copy everything 1-to-1.”

Production decisions that mattered:

  • Quick messy Blender blockout for proportions, then modular pieces assembled in Unreal. Real locations are irregular and do not fit the engine grid, so pivots were placed for assembly rather than forcing alignment.
  • Materials were planned by drawing them onto the blockout meshes — the artistic decisions were front-loaded so production could focus on execution.
  • Texel density of 1024 px/m, the common third-person target. Height detail came from ZBrush sculpts baked down, straight from Substance 3D Painter, or trim sheets; decal normals were derived from real photos via a web converter.
  • All wall materials in one Substance 3D Designer file with procedural parameters for plaster and concrete variants, and the same approach for the road. Reuse over new materials, base colour variants over new files.
  • One vertex-blending material handling four materials via a noise map and height-based blending; RGB masks on some walls explicitly to save texture space; textures packed as ORM, or ORD where height was needed.
  • Decals were the single biggest realism lever — they break up tiling and add the variation a realistic scene needs. The before/after is the most convincing slide in the piece, and sand decals were used to blend sand into the gutters.
  • Post-process was added only after the base materials looked good on their own; performance was tracked throughout by limiting texture count, using trims and simple shaders, and applying Nanite selectively rather than blanket.

The stated takeaway is about pace, not technique: coming out of school’s tight deadlines, the biggest improvement was slowing down to plan and research — and understanding why each step was being taken, not just which step came next.

Worth reading for the sequencing alone: plan materials on the blockout, get base colours right before grading, decals before polish. Each one avoids a whole round of rework.