Irmak “Max” Çavun, a 3D generalist working in AAA art production, set herself a constraint for a personal project: assemble a fully modular abandoned Middle Eastern courtyard in Unreal using only tiling textures and in-engine material blending, with no concept art. The reason was practical. Years of gathering reference for the region had collapsed into “shades of brown,” and she had been fooled more than once by AI-generated images sitting in her reference boards.

Most of the breakdown is about one change to the pipeline: abandoning the classic waterfall (concept, reference, blockout, workup, polish) for passes, with the whole scene kept at a representative level rather than polished piece by piece.

The pass order:

  • Blockout — Maya blockout at real-world proportions, imported early into Unreal to feel scale and fix camera placement.
  • Pass 1 (Alpha) — first-pass models and textures. Representative, not final.
  • Pass 2 (Beta) — second-pass models and materials, blending, vegetation.
  • Polish — blending, skirting, decals, cameras, cloth and wind simulation.

Why that ordering paid off:

  • Materials get judged in context, not in a gray viewport. First-pass maps were exported early to check colour and “busyness”. When the garden tiles landed and the planned body of water clearly was not reading, everything was still partial height and colour maps — so the fix was cheap and the water stayed in the scene.
  • Not everything needs a second pass. Keeping the scene at representative quality revealed which assets never earned polish at all.
  • Modularity was a texel-density problem, not a kit-size problem. Middle Eastern architecture resisted the usual 2x4 m and 4x4 m format, so the build used a few core tiles plus many smaller snapping pieces layered on top.
  • One master material instead of many. Dynamic aging with exposed parameters was built in from the first pass; by pass 2 the master material handled RGB masking, vertex painting and texture painting — six paint channels. Result: no unique textures anywhere, and a single master material for everything except water, background sky and decals.
  • Lighting was tuned in isolation. Each source was tweaked alone with the others off, then re-tuned with everything on. Bounce lights were hand-placed on surfaces that act like mirrors rather than left to the engine, and highlights were treated as painting a concept.

The transferable part is not the environment art specifics. It is the target definition — representative enough to evaluate in the engine, and no more — plus aging-aware materials built before they were needed. Çavun says she will not go back to 1:1 textures except for look-dev portfolio pieces, because RGB masking and layering get you most of a texture painter inside the engine itself.