I knew I was going to go with a centered composition for my final shots, so having lots of leading lines all flowing towards the AI core helped with that. I tried to re-enforce the triangular shape of the hall with the blue light strip at the end, which also helps frame the AI. I planned the environment to be seen from only a few key screenshots and from a limited players perspective if it was an actual game. Planning out your shots in advance can really help you zero in on where you need to maximize your time and efforts.

I think a big mistake a lot of beginner environment artists make is they focus on trying to make every little detail just right, when most of the time after a lighting pass, a lot of it is hidden in shadow or not even noticeable. This can lead to a lot of mismanaged time and skewed priorities – and this is why blocking out your scenes is so important. Doing a quick lighting pass can give you some context on where to invest your time. 6 hours spent modeling and uniquely unwrapping/texturing a background prop off in the distance is a waste, especially when you can quickly model a few interesting shapes, UV it with trims and tiling materials in 30 mins and have it achieve 99% of the same result.

While the scene feels large in size, it is actually not very complex. For example, I made a “ram chip” that I just duplicated and scaled at random size variations for a lot of the tech details. I find just experimenting with a limited set of assets in Unreal you can get decent results if you use them creatively. As most of the scene was technically a vista, I wasn’t too concerned with strict texel density. Most of the visuals were coming from the lighting, normals, and reflections anyways, not detailed albedos and intricate edge wear in the texture work.