Software: Unreal Engine 5, 3DS Max, Substance, Speedtree, GAEA, Photoshop, After Effects

A WIP world being built in Unreal Engine 5, conceived as a parallel underworld where blue skies and white light are replaced by a permanent aurora, dark twilight, and quiet sacred architecture. Mysterious, dark, yet oddly comforting. The world is anchored by two main pieces in development: a stylized alpine landscape inspired by the Central Oregon Cascades, and a sacred palace complex sitting atop one of its mountains.

-The Landscape-
The terrain and surrounding range are inspired by the alpine and high desert ecology of Central Oregon, pushed into a more cinematic, dreamlike register through a heightened aurora and atmospheric treatment. The aurora is the centerpiece of the lighting setup, with everything else built around supporting it rather than competing with it.

-The Sol Palace-
A sacred ziggurat-like complex sitting atop one of the mountains in the landscape, fusing ancient terrestrial architecture with sci-fi monolithic forms. It's a sanctuary built for an unnamed inhabitant, watched over by glowing yellow rings that seem to appear and disappear, grow and shrink at particular times, as if the inhabitant is somehow making use of them.

-Terrain-
The mountain and surrounding terrain were authored in Gaea, building out the silhouette and erosion character of the range before bringing it into Unreal. Still a work in progress, with refinement passes on the material breakup, foliage, and small-scale detail planned.

-Foliage-
Custom ponderosa pines are being authored in SpeedTree, alongside a broader set of high desert and mixed alpine vegetation to match the real ecology of the Central Oregon range. Polycam was used to grab real world scans of bark material that were then baked down to a material. Needle cards were custom modeled. The environment is currently running on billboard foliage as a placeholder, with a handful of deciduous trees pulled from the Megascans library standing in for the mixed alpine setup until the SpeedTree work is complete.

-Sky and Atmosphere-
Lighting and atmospherics are art-directed through Ultra Dynamic Sky, which gave me fine control over the aurora's color and intensity, the cloud layer behavior, and the overall mood of the scene.

-Particle Work-
The twinkling stars and shooting stars are an original Niagara particle system authored from scratch, tuned to layer naturally into the aurora without pulling focus. The twinkles drift subtly across the sky, and the shooting stars fire on intervals timed to feel ambient rather than scripted.

-Design Intent-
The architecture draws from Mesopotamian step temples and Indian rock-cut sanctuaries for the foundational silhouette and tiered structure, while Shang Dynasty bronze ornamentation will be a centerpiece for future material direction, on top of monolithic sci-fi language inspired by Halo's Forerunner architecture. Destiny's Black Garden and Vault of Glass are inspiration for the scale and the sense of an ancient power source still humming inside the stone. Fumito Ueda's work, particularly Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian, sits underneath all of it as the tonal target: enormous, quiet, and lonely.
The entire scene is heavily inspired by the Palace of Twilight from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, situated in the dark skies of the Twilight realm. I decided to take that idea and give it a surface world that I'm currently referring to as the underworld. It exists as a mirror of an opposite parallel world where the blue skies, puffy clouds, and lush greenery are all drenched in pure white light. The Sol is the one beacon of pure light in this underworld, and it serves as the energy that allows the palace to function as the bridge between the two.