Suzhou Garden - Unreal Environment Diorama Design
Cinematic Render 1
Cinematic Render 2
Photo Render
Bonsai Trunk Sculpt
Rock Sculpt
Rock Sculpt 2
Reference Image
Tech Progress Showcase
Considered the complexity of the window pattern based on the reference (last image of this post), I came up a solution to utilize the displacement map in order to recreate the desired pattern in blender.
Opacity Mask applied for RVT Material Projections
Procedural materials used in the scene
Biome Kit
or this project, I wanted to apply what I’ve learned during my time at 1047 Games, where I worked alongside experienced artists. I was a biome artist on a large open-world map, and through that, I gained hands-on experience with shader tools, workflows, and biome asset creation—all of which helped me become a more independent environment artist.
This diorama is a Chinese Garden, and it reflects my goal of focusing on foliage, rocks, and shader/blueprint work to push the visual quality.
A couple of highlights I’d like to mention:
I used RVT projection for the road to help it blend more naturally with the landscape material.
For the rocks, I implemented a UDIM texture workflow combined with vertex painting. While I originally planned to build a fully procedural rock material, I also wanted to introduce some variation to make the surfaces feel more detailed. To do this, I added a vertex channel to paint in edge normals and baked curvature maps for each rock to drive texture variation through UDIM masks.
There’s still more I’m experimenting with, but I hope you enjoy the project! Feedback is always welcome—thanks!
Also, thanks my former colleague, Michael Delceg, Guillaume Hecht, Lewis Walden and Tyler Thomas for comments and feedbacks throughtou the work. Much appreciated!
