Building a Modular Snowy Church Environment in Unreal Engine 5

Introduction

For this project, I wanted to build a cold, isolated environment around a ruined chapel in the mountains. The original idea was bigger: a modular village kit with the chapel as the main landmark. During production, I cut the scope and focused on pushing one building to a stronger finish while keeping the kit reusable enough to expand later.

The scene was built in Unreal Engine 5 with Blender, ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter, Substance 3D Designer, Photoshop, SpeedTree, Marmoset Toolbag, Gaea, and a few smaller supporting tools. The main goals were mood, modularity, believable weathering, and a workflow that still made sense for real-time production.

Starting from the Concept

The environment was based on concept art by Jérémy Cohen. What pulled me in was the mood: an abandoned chapel that still felt sacred, isolated, and slightly unsettling. I wanted to keep that emotional read, but make the structure believable as a 3D space.

I gathered references for aged wood, damaged thatched roofs, snow buildup, mountain lighting, rural religious details, and weathered construction. The concept gave me the direction, but reference helped solve the practical questions: how the chapel was built, where snow would collect, how materials would age, and how much damage the structure could take before it stopped feeling believable.

The main storytelling idea was that the chapel should feel abandoned, but not completely dead. The warm light near the entrance suggests someone may still be using it, and that contrast became the emotional hook of the scene.

Composition and Overall Read

I had a rough final camera early, but I did not lock it too soon. First, I focused on the blockout, proportions, and silhouette. Once the chapel had enough presence, I adjusted the framing around the strongest shapes. The main reads are the tower, the roofline, and the lit entrance. I chose a mostly front-facing composition because it made the chapel feel more iconic and ceremonial.

A more angled shot gave more depth, but it weakened the relationship between the tower and the entrance. The early version felt too clean and symmetrical. The scene started to work after I pushed the damage: warped planks, broken roof pieces, uneven beams, wall gaps, layered snow, and a rougher silhouette. That was when it stopped looking like a clean modular assembly and started feeling shaped by weather and time.

Blockout and Modular Planning

I used real-world scale as a base, but pushed some proportions for mood and readability. I cared less about strict historical accuracy and more about how the chapel felt from player height. It needed to look old and damaged, but still imposing. During blockout, I checked two things: silhouette and reuse.

The building had to read clearly from a distance, but it also had to break down into practical modular pieces. Since the initial plan was a village kit, I wanted the same parts to work beyond this single chapel. The main kit was planned around wall sections, roof modules, tower pieces, beams, windows, doors, floors, fences, and trims.

I adjusted the blockout several times so the forms worked better on the grid and could be rebuilt as reusable sections instead of one-off geometry. I used a human reference model throughout the project to check entrances, stairs, roof height, and overall scale. It helped me judge whether the building felt believable from a gameplay perspective, not only from the final camera.

Building the Modular Set

The chapel was assembled from modular pieces first. After the base structure worked, I added unique damage and hand-placed details to break repetition. The core kit included 12 wall pieces, 5 roof modules, 5 loose roof planks, 3 fence pieces, 3 facade pieces, 3 beams, plus individual elements such as the chimney, pillars, door, and stairs. For the surrounding environment, I created 4 trees, 5 bushes, and grass pieces, one Gaea mountain mass, 3 rock props, logs, and roughly a dozen smaller props.

I used two 4K trim sheets and several 4K tileable textures. One trim sheet was mainly for wall and structural surfaces. The second was a hybrid sheet with tileable sections and uniquely sculpted plank textures. Unique props used their own texture set where needed, but most of the chapel stayed trim- and tileable-based to keep the workflow reusable.

The roof needed the most extra work. A clean modular roof looked too uniform, so I layered sculpted planks over the base structure. I made unique damaged planks in ZBrush, then placed them on top of the modular roof to create warping, broken edges, missing sections, and a less predictable silhouette.

I used the same logic on the walls. Some damage was built into modular variants, while other breakups came from decals, loose planks, holes, and hand-placed pieces. This gave me the speed of a modular workflow without making the building look procedural. Small storytelling props pushed the chapel further: crucifixes, horseshoes, ropes, animal skulls, antlers, lanterns, fences, broken planks, and painted symbols.

These details made the structure feel more specific and helped connect the architecture to the world around it. The biggest challenge was keeping the modular logic useful in production, but invisible in the final image. I wanted the kit to be reusable, but I did not want the viewer to feel the repetition. 

Materials and Snow

The material setup was built around reuse. Large surfaces used tileables, trims handled smaller architectural details, and baked assets were used only where I needed more control. I worked at a texel density of 10.24 px/cm, which kept the scene in line with a current-gen environment-art target and helped the modular pieces feel consistent when assembled.

The snow was handled with a custom Z-up shader. I used a normal-driven component so the snow would react more naturally to surface breakup instead of sitting as a flat top-down layer. I also added vertex painting and world-aligned controls so I could art-direct where the snow appeared and how clean or dirty it felt.

The shader was not meant to be complex for its own sake. It needed to be predictable, easy to control, and useful across many assets. For heavier buildup, I used separate snow pile meshes around roof beams, roof transitions, and lower areas where snow would naturally collect. Decals helped connect snow patches and hide seams between modular pieces.
The hardest material to solve was the aged wood.

Early versions were either too clean, too noisy, or too even. I started from an aged plank material based on scan data, then pushed it with dryness, grime, tonal variation, and worn edges. The real improvement came when I stopped treating wood as only a texture problem. I reshaped the geometry itself by bending planks, offsetting boards, breaking edges, opening gaps, and adding depth behind damaged areas.

When a wall had a hole, I modeled another construction layer behind it instead of leaving a flat cutout. That made the damage feel structural rather than decorative. For one facade section, I combined plank treatment with wattle and daub. I used several Megascans plank assets as a starting point, then baked them down into a single optimized texture set with cleaner UVs. That let me keep the visual quality while making the asset easier to manage. 

Environment and Dressing

The chapel was the hero, so the environment around it had to support the shot without competing with it. I built quick trees and bushes in SpeedTree, modeled the mountains separately, and placed them far enough back to sit inside the fog.

The background was mainly about depth and atmosphere. I wanted the mountains to shift into colder blue values with distance, so the scene felt spacious and integrated into the snowstorm. Some of the larger mountain shapes were placed to subtly guide the eye back toward the chapel.

The foreground was kept simple: snow, grass, fences, and a few props to ground the image. In motion, snowfall, wind, and subtle foliage movement helped the scene feel less static and added a lot to the atmosphere.

Lighting and Atmosphere

The lighting goal was a moody midday snowstorm. I wanted the scene to read as daylight, but not feel bright or comfortable. The main challenge was keeping the dark timber readable against the snow without losing the heavy, cold mood. I started with natural daylight first. The warm lanterns and entrance light were treated as accents, not as the main source of illumination.

That helped keep the environment grounded and prevented the scene from becoming too theatrical. A major issue was flatness. Some early versions were dark, but still lacked contrast. If I pushed the wood too dark, I lost the surface detail. If I brightened it too much, the chapel lost its weight.

To control the value structure, I used a few fake light-blocking planes above the scene. They helped shape the lighting and keep certain areas from washing out. It was a simple solution, but it worked well and stayed invisible to the camera. I also used Screen Space Fog Scattering in Unreal to soften the atmosphere and give the snowstorm a stronger sense of depth.

Post-process adjustments such as subtle film grain, chromatic aberration, and highlight/shadow controls helped bring the final image together. I refined the setup more seriously with guidance from Elliott McSherry from the EMC3D YouTube channel, whose feedback helped push both the lighting and the overall presentation further.

Technical Decisions

Technically, the project was not about inventing unusual systems. It was about making practical decisions that supported the art. The main production target was consistency. I kept the chapel at 10.24 px/cm texel density, with 4K textures for the trim sheets and tileables. That made it easier to reuse wall, roof, and beam pieces without obvious resolution mismatches. It also helped the unique damaged pieces sit better next to the modular kit.

The texture setup was deliberately limited: 2 trims, several tileables, and one main texture set for unique props. One trim was mainly for the wall and structural elements. The second was a hybrid sheet, combining tileable areas with uniquely sculpted plank details. This gave me enough variety for close-up damage while still keeping the material count under control.

The snow shader used a straightforward production-style setup: Z-up projection, normal influence, vertex painting, world-aligned controls, and parameters for cleaner or dirtier snow states. I wanted something flexible enough to support the scene, but simple enough that I could still art direct it quickly.

The scene used Nanite and Lumen in Unreal Engine 5. Nanite helped with sculpted damage and dense geometry where needed, while Lumen made lighting iteration faster. Even though this was a portfolio piece, I still watched material usage, shader complexity, and asset consistency. I wanted the final result to feel connected to game production, not only to a beauty render. 

Problems and Lessons Learned

The hardest parts were the thatched roof, roof blending, and making modular walls feel natural. The roof had to look layered, damaged, and snow-covered, but it still needed a clear read. It went through several reworks before I found a balance I was willing to keep.

Scope was the other major lesson. I originally wanted to show more village buildings, but that would have spread the work too thin. Finishing one strong environment was a better decision than showing a larger but weaker kit. If I restarted the project, I would lock the modular kit and trim sheet plan earlier. Some asset decisions were made too late, which created extra work.

I would also cut the village idea sooner instead of trying to preserve it for as long as I did. The part I am happiest with is the wood treatment. The aging, breakup, rotten details, and uneven construction ended up doing a lot of the storytelling. The part I am still less satisfied with is the roof snow and some of the roof blending. It works, but I can see areas where it could be cleaner.

Final Thoughts

This project taught me a lot about balancing modular workflow with artistic intent. A kit can give structure and efficiency, but the environment only starts to feel alive once it has damage, asymmetry, material variation, lighting, and small story details layered on top.

With The Last Chapel, I wanted to create a place that felt decayed and half-forgotten, but not completely silent. That tension shaped most of the decisions in the scene, from the composition and wood treatment to the snow, lighting, and final dressing.

Eric Blaida, Senior Environment Artist/3D Artist