This individual project is a digitally constructed environment developed as a rendered video. The scene was carefully sketched and planned before modeling, establishing a purely blue-and-white alien world as the visual and conceptual foundation. All assets were modeled in Blender and ZBrush, then rendered in Twinmotion, a real-time visualization platform built on Unreal Engine.
The environment was composed with close attention to atmosphere and spatial storytelling. Elements such as the layered moons, the semi-transparent mountains, the shattered monumental structures embedded with personal symbolic motifs, and the central eye sculpture were all intentionally designed to shape the mood and narrative of the scene. Together, these components create a sense of scale, stillness, and otherworldliness within the landscape.
Through this project, I explored the full pipeline of real-time environment creation. I learned how to control polygon density at the scene level, bake high-resolution sculpts into optimized low-poly assets using normal maps, and balance visual fidelity with real-time performance. I also focused on managing spatial relationships across a large environment—using composition, lighting, and material behavior to guide the viewer’s attention—while gaining hands-on experience building and rendering scenes within a UE-based workflow.
JIHONG ZHAO 