Artist breaks down stylized Unreal Engine 5 cabin scene built with trim sheets

Perayil, who works at Art Bully Productions LLC, says Hearth and Hillside started as a mood rather than a concept: a cozy, warm, calm landscape inspired by saturated traditional paintings. One goal was to improve his foliage pipeline. He also wanted to dig further into lighting and final post-processing.

He splits blockout into three passes. The proxy pass uses primitive shapes for scale and base forms. The value pass adds definition, basic lighting and greyscale textures to check contrast and readability. The color pass sets the palette. The composition uses the house as the focal point against a bright sky, a winding river and V-shaped mountain slopes as leading lines, and foreground rocks for framing.

For terrain, he hand-sculpted the foreground and main ground with Unreal Engine's Landscape tools. The distant mountains were generated procedurally in Gaea, and the meshes and base textures were exported. He then ran the textures through Substance 3D Painter's new Stylization filter to match the painterly look. The landscape material has four layers (Grass, Dirt, DirtPath and RiverBed) joined with the Landscape Layer Blend node and height blending. It outputs Runtime Virtual Texturing for color and normals, which blends rocks and foliage meshes into the ground. Grass color variation comes from a packed texture holding different grunge patterns in its R, G and B channels, layered at large and medium tiling scales.

The cabin follows a material-first approach. Perayil made a stylized wood material in Substance 3D Designer, then a tileable version and a trim sheet. He modeled a small set of planks with UVs mapped to the trim sheet and built modular wall pieces and prefabs from them. The roof shingles come from a trim texture on a plane that was then extruded. The metal sheets were taken into Substance 3D Painter for hand-painted rust and water leaks.

The master wall shader in Unreal Engine provides color tinting, macro color variation and RVT color blending, and relies on vertex painting. Two triplanar grunge layers reuse the landscape variation map and are masked by the Blue vertex channel. A dirt layer uses the Red channel. A top layer masked by Green blends custom colors, including a deep stylized blue in ambient occlusion areas. A packed utility map adds an edge mask (Green) and inverted ambient occlusion (Blue) to reduce visible repetition across the duplicated planks.

On vegetation, the scene has three tree types: a yellow hero tree, a pine and an oak. Leaf shapes were drawn in Affinity Designer for a foliage atlas, bark was made in Substance 3D Designer, and the trees were generated in SpeedTree with a focus on silhouette. Poly counts were kept low, especially on the heavily instanced pines. Canopy normals were edited to point upward, and vertex colors were applied to drive shader features. The interview also covers plants, ivy and grass as separate categories.