Village Island

I'm making an island village in Unreal 4.2. Yes, this is an older version of Unreal, but that was what my class was in so I’m trying this out. The next project will be in the most recent version of Unreal which as of now is 5.5.

I've created a design doc for the moments I want to have in this space so I'm building with that in mind. 3/5/2025

-Mat

Goals:

Sculpt and texture terrain.

Experiment with Blender.

Import and place assets.

Experiment with lighting and a shifting time of day.

Implement simple triggers with moving physics and fx.

Explore and have fun.

3/5/2025

This is the layout I sketched up before starting the block out.

Initial progress on the block out in unreal.

3/13/2025

This is continued progress on the block out.

View of the back of the island.

3/16/2025

This is continued progress on the block out.

View of the back of the island.

5/17/2025

I've started making some block out assets to test scale in blender and play with usage.

I have been gathering reference images for architecture I want my buildings to emulate. These currently placeholders don’t reflect any future style, just scale really and how I want the space to be held.

I’m enjoying learning blender though.

5/29/2025

-Created a walkthrough video

-Small landscape revisions

-Playing with block out assets

-Learning more about blender and the import process to unreal.

5/31/2025

Began swapping out the blockout shapes for landscape terrain.

5/31/2025 Night Session

Started playing with materials, landscape texture layers, and UV Tiling.

Generally all engines want to do the same thing, they just do it in different ways so I’m just finding out how Unreal handles things.

You know you are on the right path when you’ve got soupy rocks.

6/1/2025

Lots of material work.

Set up a landscape blend and some material functions.

Now I can paint textures!

Still need to fix the UV Tiling, but that’ll be for tomorrow.

6/14/2025

Got delayed but spent today actually working on some building concepts and their style.

These are influenced by japanese structures from the Momoyama period.

Hopefully tonight or tomorrow continue work on the landscape textures that need to be completely setup.

6/15/2025

Morning Session

More material work

Added Camera Depth Fade for dynamic UV tiling based on camera view.

Quick path paint.

Basic camera depth fade setup (above)

Camera depth fade effect on UV tiling. Textures close to camera tile differently than those far away. This is before playing with values. (above)

Incorporating camera depth fade into the material function which updates the landscape texture blend. (above)

Camera Depth Fade in action. (above)

Some path painting. Top view of island. (above)

6/15/2025

Afternoon Session

Sculpting work, subbing out block out shapes and carving more terrain.

Quick paint pass on rocks and removing blockout shapes for sculpted terrain.

(Above)

More block outs removed and beginning to sculpt the rock formations.

(Above)

That mountain needs something big up there…

(Above)

6/29/2025

Sketched a large temple to sit on the mountain.

Created some blockouts in Blender for the mountain temple and the town bell at entrance.

Temple Shape Test and Scene Test

(Above)

Temple Bell block out

(Above)

Now with entrance block outs in

(Above)

7/5/2025

Feeling kind of low energy, so mostly just doing minor things to get me in the mood again.

-Worked on block out collision of the temple bell so it could be walked through.

-Some terrain sculpting and texture work, nothing crazy but general basecoats of texture.

-Made a block out for the player start, i don’t really like it but I was playing with it at least.

-Playing with lighting.

Playing with lighting

(Above)

Bell Complex Collision using static mesh.

(Above)

Changes to terrain and texture

(Above)

Changes to terrain and texture back view.

(Above)

Starting area block out that i’m not in love with.

(Above)

-Created a placeholder rock spire.

-Created a placeholder bridge.

-Some collision work.

-Played with atmospheric fog.

7/15/2025

Placeholder rock spire.

(Above)

Rock spire placeholder in scene.

(Above)

Rock spires swapped.

(Above)

Atmospheric Fog.

(Above)

Fog from player start view.

(Above)

7/15/2025

Night Session

Rock block outs

Getting more comfortable with general modeling in blender

7/19/2025

Getting into UV unwrapping in Blender.
You can see the generated UV Map in blender and the stretching on the model in unreal below.

Some simple seam work and map generation to eliminate stretching gives me this (above) but seams become more apparent (below).

Granted I'm using a free texture that isn't setup for an deliberate mapping, but even with this it looks better and I could model to hide the seams or make a catered texture file.

Either way its super fun and I can see the possibilities!