Marco Spitz - House on the Hill

House on the Hill - 3D Environment in UE5

Atmospheric night view of the timbered house with blue lighting and fog

Main Shot - moody night view

Golden hour close-up of the house architecture with red roof tiles

Main Shot 2 - early evening / golden hour

Moody exterior night shot of the timbered house silhouette

View of the fence and house with surrounding grass and foliage

Interior window glow illuminating the house interior

Atmospheric path leading to the house with procedural terrain

Golden hour view of the path and house with warm lighting

Blender vs Unreal Engine 5: Comparison between Blender (left) and Unreal Engine 5 (right)

Real-time walkthrough showcasing the environment and its details

Key Considerations

Due to the size of the environment, proceduralism was essential. I focused on finding technical solutions that emphasize reusability and easy iteration. Additonally Performance was a major concern throughout development, with the target of maintaining 60+ FPS on mid- to high-end PCs.

Final scene in Unreal Engine 5 with atmospheric lighting and fog

Progress - Blender Viewport (left) vs Final Scene in UE5 (right)

Vertex paint shader in UE5 using the Layered Material System - the setup allows for different layers including regular plaster, deformed plaster, moss coverage and brick wall with mortar and procedural normals for added detail

Rock shader combining mask shaders and triplanar UVs to enhance detail while preserving high texture resolution across all asset sizes. Moss is applied using vertex normals and procedural noise for a natural, varied look.

World Position Offset shader blending multiple WPO techniques with vertex colors to create a natural, computationally efficient effect that adapts based on the asset's rotation.

UE5 Splinemesh tool

Vegetation - Created procedurally through the UE5 PCG framework
Allowing for realistic and varied foliage - The foliage uses a LOD system and WPO disable distance for both performance and visual fidelity.

Landscape Erosion - Created with the UE5 Landmass Pulgin
Allowing for quick creation of terrain and paths without having to swap software.

Reference images and mood board for House on the Hill project

I created several shaders using UE5’s Layered Material System, enabling versatility and reusability. These include vertex paint shaders with layered materials for enhanced surface complexity and height blending.
I also implemented a World Position Offset shader combining multiple effects modulated by vertex colors to simulate natural surface deformation that adapts to asset rotation - this approach is much more efficient than CPU-based alternatives.
By combining individually textured assets and bigger assets with tiling textures, I efficiently reduced texture disk usage while maintaining high visual quality.
The landscape material uses runtime virtual textures, enabling it to run performance efficient, even with lot of sampled textures and complex blending. This also allows for seamless blending of assets into the terrain. I also utilize Nanite landscape tesselation for enhanced detail.
Throughout development, I learned many new techniques to efficiently manage such a large environment.

Workflow

All the assets and textures featured in the project are created by myself. For the textures I used Substance Designer, focusing on a slightly stylized aesthetic using RGBA texture packing and a physically based rendering (PBR) workflow. The project consists of 15 Materials, 5 Decals with four variations each. The assets were modeled, sculpted and UVed in Blender, focusing on a slightly exaggerated shapes. Baking and texturing were done in Substance Painter. The projects consists of over 100 individual assets.

Oak trees - created in TreeIt

Houdini Digital Assets

I created multiple Houdini Tools wich can be used in Unreal Engine to speed up the development and generate complex scenes quickly and easily. The Tools mainly rely on instancing to cut to optimize performance and required memory.

Covers objects with realistic ivy vines using a hybrid of instanced leaves and geometry-based branches. Switch between random generation and hand-drawn branch mode for easier art direction. Includes wind influence calculation on branches.

Ivy Tool - Examples

Houdini Digital Asset graph for ivy tool

HDA-Graph in Houdini - showing the procedural setup of the Ivy Tool

Generates a Fence based on a Curve input and instanced static meshes. Switch between different settings like curved or straight fences, add gates or pillars at corners.

Wood Pile Tool Example

Generates a physic simulated wood pile using instanced logs and a draped cover blanket.

Generates a rope with drying cloth based on a curve Input. Change settings like the amount off cloth and the amount the ropes hangs down. Calculates vertex color for later use with UE5 WPO offset shaders

Instances Static Meshes on a Roof shape. Change the distance between the tiles and the amount of regular and random rotation.

Generates and simulates Cables based on a curve input. Collides with input geometry. Choose the amount off big and small cables. Calculates vertex color for later use with UE5 WPO offset shaders