Project
The Merchant's Souk
Year
2025
Category
Environment Art
Software
Unreal Engine5 /Maya /Zbrush
Substance Designer /Painter
Marvelous Designer
This is one of my demo reel projects from Gnomon, themed around a Middle Eastern marketplace, inspired by Victor Cloux's concept art on ArtStation. The scene features stone architecture, fabric-canopied stalls, pottery, and metal vessels as typical elements of a bustling market.
Strong natural lighting creates an afternoon market atmosphere. All assets were created solely by me, except for vegetation sourced from Megascans.
Process Breakdown
How can an environment tell its own story without relying on characters? This was the challenge I set for myself.
Large, open spaces often struggle with visual coherence and lose compositional focus. To break away from the concept art's reliance on character-driven navigation, I used hanging fabrics and ropes as visual guides, while multiple light sources draw attention to the main shop.
Additionally, I employed Exponential Height Fog and Fog Planes to deliberately soften the background city gate, maintaining depth while ensuring the viewer's eye lands precisely on the primary focal point.
Materials
I created tileable textures in Substance Designer. My approach is to establish base materials first, then add additional details and weathering in Unreal Engine using decals or grunge masks blended into the shader for refined material variation.
Assets
Modeled in Maya with modular architecture planning. Damaged wall sections and hero props were high-poly sculpted in ZBrush.
Shader Breakdown
Depending on whether Nanite is used, I employed different methods: mesh paint and vertex paint. UV Set 1 contains UVs with fixed texel density, while UV Set 2 has UVs laid out within 0-1 space to properly support mesh paint.
POT MATERIAL
Lighting Breakdown
Directional Light / Detail Light / Exponential Height Fog / Post Process Volume
