Alpine Environment.
About.
This project is a digital recreation of a mountain valley in the Pyrenees, built in Gaea and Unreal Engine. My aim was to create an immersive and atmospheric virtual environment, one that holds up as a convincing sense of place inside a real-time engine. I drove that outcome using my own lived experience of these landscapes, translating a place I'd spent time in, into a faithful digital replica, built with real elevation data and my own photographic reference.
Process.
Real-world height data was gathered, imported and tweaked in Gaea to create the virtual terrain. A custom landscape material was made in Unreal that naturally transitions textures between grass, rock and snow according to the elevation. Foliage and 3D assets were hand-placed for compositional depth. Atmospherics were tuned directly against my reference, including volumetric fog, a Rayleigh-accurate sky and a Niagara pine-needle system, and the space was shot with virtual cameras and rendered into a cinematic showcase reel.
Outcomes.
This is craft in service of immersion. It is a real-time environment where my experience has guided my creative direction and technical ability to produce something both immersive and technically compelling. The result is a real-time environment that can be adapted to an array of industry applications such as virtual production, VFX, game development and advertising.
