Winter Village

A 4-week reimagination of my original winter village render, in a larger scale with UE5's real-time capabilities - with inspiration from Skyrim.

I wanted to develop a large winter environment set at night, and originally experimented with a much heavier layer of snow covering.
This changed a week into the project after I couldn't pull some aspects off convincingly enough, and it felt much more fun and interesting to look at an environment with more vegetation sticking up among a light sprinkle of snow - rather than just a uniform, barren landscape with trees and rocks only.
Later on in the project I decided it would be fun to do a daytime version at the same time with a more dense fog, and heavier snowstorm.

A modular workflow allowed me to create few amounts of assets that could be kitbashed into various variations and combinations (such as the buildings) to increase variety.

Houses and any addons for houses were modelled from the ground up, with a mix of textures from Megascans and usage of Substance Painter. Landscape and foliage consists of a mix of Megascans assets and textures, with packs from the UE Marketplace for trees and mountains backdrops - and sound effects sourced and edited from freesound.org.