Breakdown: Creating a Realistic 3D Environment of an Ankara Street

Environment artist Nore Pollentier shared the production process for Ankara Alley, a real-time 3D environment based on a street in Ankara. The project combines modular construction, procedural materia

When transferring a real location into a game-ready 3D environment, simply replicating the visible scene is not enough. Nore Pollentier’s Ankara Alley is a real-time environment project that first reverse-searched photos of an actual Ankara alley and located it on a map to gather reference material from multiple angles, then matched the proportions and composition. The initial blockout was created in Blender, and the final assembly was carried out in Unreal Engine.

Balancing the Real Location and Modules

Real-world buildings do not fit precisely into a grid, but reusable modules are necessary for production efficiency. This project replaced the blockout with modular pieces for walls, windows, and other structures, while considering pivot positions and grid alignment to make assembly easier in Unreal Engine. To preserve the irregularity of the real location, assembly convenience and variation in form must be judged together rather than pursuing perfect standardization.

Handling Height Information and Tiling Materials

The bricks were sculpted in ZBrush and then optimized, while the tiling materials for the walls and roads were created in Substance 3D Designer. The key was setting variations in plaster and concrete, along with stone and dirt elements, as procedural parameters for quick iterative adjustments. The walls used vertex blending, allowing four materials to be painted using noise maps and height-based blending, while the road used only two materials and added surface depth with Nanite displacement.

Increasing Detail While Preserving Performance

Decals are a way to break up repeating textures and add realistic traces, but endlessly increasing the number of separate textures raises costs. The artist reused existing textures for decals wherever possible and limited draw calls with trim sheets, simple Unreal shaders, and modular assets. The lighting was based on a primary directional light coming from behind and an HDRI, while softer shadows and post-processing adjustments completed the evening atmosphere.

Source: 80 Level original article