Assembling Abandoned Middle Eastern Courtyard in 3D Using Pass-Based Workflow

Abandoned Middle Eastern Courtyard is a modular environment project created in Unreal Engine 5 by 3D generalist Irmak Çavun. Its workflow uses blockout, two production passes, and polish to evaluate m

Irmak Çapın’s Abandoned Middle Eastern Courtyard is a Middle Eastern-style ruined courtyard environment built from photographs of a real location. Combining reference materials from places in Iran with memories of Türkiye, the artist created a space featuring a water channel, garden tiles, and fabric decorations. The key was to first assess the overall density, colors, and flow of the scene in the engine before completing individual props.

Create a ‘Representative State’ First Instead of the Finished Version

The work began with a blockout in Maya, then moved to Unreal Engine to check scale and camera, proceeding through alpha, beta, and polishing passes. While a typical linear pipeline refines one asset all the way to completion, this method first brings every element up to a representative state, then determines the next steps by observing how they fit together. The issue that the water area lacked impact was also discovered during the draft material stage, making it possible to quickly change direction.

Modules and Layers Reduce Repetitive Work

The architecture was built from core 2×4m and 4×4m pieces, with smaller snap pieces placed on top. The materials combined RGB masking, vertex painting, and texture painting in a single master material, while most of the walls, props, and vegetation were varied through instances with different degrees of aging. Since the scene elements, excluding the water, sky, and decals, share one master material, this approach is better suited to scene-level adjustments and repeated revisions than creating unique textures anew for each asset.

Lighting Is Evaluated by Separating the Light Sources

During the polishing stage, material blending, decals, and cloth and wind simulations were added before refining the lighting. Çapın divided the lighting into six areas—directional light, sky and atmosphere, bounce light, highlights, the sky background, and fog cards—and first adjusted the effect of each light with the others turned off. Rather than relying solely on the reflected light calculated by the engine, directly placing lights for reflective surfaces such as the bright path demonstrates a balance between a fast workflow and deliberate art direction.

Source: 80 Level interview