Still Waters

Stylized Environment | Personal Project | 2026

A gentle breeze sweeps over the rolling hills, brushing past stones, rustling trees, and swaying foliage, while a still pond shelters a small flock of ducks. This project served as a sandbox for exploring stylized environment design – from terrain shaping to asset creation.

Project Overview

I wanted to learn how to create all the different asset types needed for building an environment. After watching several tutorials by Justin Wallace – whose landscape style I admire – I set out to achieve a similar look. My goal was to craft a pond populated with ducks and a small house for them, inspired by a pond I pass by frequently on my walks. I began with a rough value study to establish the visual direction, then moved on to creating the individual assets.

Landscape

At first, I focused on building the landscape. Using Unreal Engine’s native tools, I shaped the terrain and created seamless, tiling textures for the ground.

Water

The water effect is implemented entirely with shaders. I followed tutorials to assemble the necessary shader nodes and then adapted the values to achieve the specific look and requirements of my scene. It was one of my first experiences working with Unreal’s shader nodes, which felt overwhelming at first, but eventually I got the hang of it.

Plants and Clouds

I painted color and opacity textures for foliage, trees, and clouds, then applied those textures to 3D cards. To generate the trees, I used a dedicated tree‑generation tool, and afterwards I scattered the resulting assets across the scene with Unreal’s foliage tools.

Cliffs

To model the rocks, I began with a rough block‑out to establish the overall shape. I then refined the geometry using a sculpting tool, adding detail and creating a high‑poly version. From this high‑poly base I generated both high‑poly and low‑poly meshes, which were later used in the texturing workflow.

House

I modeled the house architecture and then UV‑unwrapped all of its components. After the unwrapping, I separated the mesh into the various material groups I intended to create, and then imported into Unreal.

Final Touches

In the end I added some paricles and ducks. Then spent time working on the final composition. I'm happy how it turned out I learned a lot about asset creation. I found shader and texutre node setups still quite complicated but I feel I have a much better grasp on it now. Next time I will be able to do things without needing as much guidance from tutorials.

Credits

Special thanks to 3D Artist Justin Walllace. I learned a lot from his courses about stylized environment's, which sparked many of the ideas behind this project.