LogInMykola Voron talked about the Desert Environment project, discussing establishing the composition, adding sand using a custom shader, and setting lighting to create a deep and immersive scene using Blender, Substance 3D Painter, and Unreal Engine 5.
Desert Environment – My First Major Personal Project
Hi! My name is Mykola Voron, and I’m a 3D Environment Artist from Ukraine. I currently work as a freelancer. About 2-3 years ago, I began my journey into the world of 3D modeling, and I’ve been passionately developing my skills ever since.
From the very beginning, I dreamed of creating my own environment – a little world that I built from the ground up, one that you could immerse yourself in and explore. The Desert Environment became my first large and serious project, marking an important step toward my goal of becoming a professional Environment Artist. I'm truly glad I decided to take it on.
This project gave me the opportunity to dive deeper into landscape building and lighting in Unreal Engine 5, while also pushing me to refine my overall environment design and atmosphere creation skills.
Inspiration & References
In the early stages, I gathered a reference board using PureRef. I selected one key reference that best reflected the vision I had in mind, and categorized the rest into themes such as rocks, vegetation, roads, and atmospheric effects. This structured reference gathering helped me understand how to balance and combine various environmental elements to achieve a cohesive final result.
Scene Building
Once I determined the types of assets I’d need for the scene, I started gathering them from Quixel Megascans and FAB. Any missing elements I modeled myself – one of them being the iconic power pole featured in the scene.
My approach was to build the scene quickly and iterate from there. I began with a rough blockout, focusing only on the primary forms rather than details. This helped me lay down a solid compositional foundation.
The core idea behind the composition was to guide the viewer’s eye into the distance. I used the road and power lines as leading lines to reinforce a sense of depth. The rock formations stretching across the landscape amplify this effect, creating a mysterious and expansive feeling. To organize the layout, I split the environment into three layers – foreground, midground, and background, which helped balance the scene and enhance the sense of scale.
Materials & Shaders
In addition to a core Master Material, I developed a custom shader to add sand accumulation on rocks near the road and soil buildup on cliffs. This helped unify the elements and gave the environment a more natural and believable look.
To achieve this, I used the World Aligned Blend node in Unreal Engine, which allows textures like dust, moss, or snow to be projected based on world coordinates. It’s perfect for environmental blending effects, and in this case, it helped convey how sand interacts with rocky surfaces.
Lighting & Atmosphere
Lighting played a crucial role in this project. I aimed to create a believable sunlit desert scene with strong midday heat and distant haze. I primarily used directional light and Lumen global illumination, which worked beautifully for this type of outdoor lighting.
I also made use of spotlights and point lights to fine-tune shadows and highlights in specific areas.
For localized fog effects, I highly recommend the EasyFog plugin – it helped me place dense fog pockets where the default UE5 height fog wasn’t giving the desired results. I also used a Post Process Volume to boost the overall atmosphere: adjusting contrast, enhancing warm tones, and adding a subtle bloom effect.
Conclusion
One of the biggest challenges in this project was finding the right balance between composition and scale. Since improving my composition skills was one of my primary goals, I spent a lot of time refining scene layout and tweaking elements to achieve a strong visual flow. Looking back, I now understand many things I didn’t at the time – and I would approach certain aspects differently based on what I’ve learned.
If I could offer one piece of advice to aspiring artists, it wouldn’t be about technique. It would be this: create what you’re genuinely passionate about. Don’t focus on impressing others – focus on expressing yourself. When your work is rooted in personal curiosity and emotion, people can feel that authenticity. This stage of your artistic growth is the perfect time to explore freely and make mistakes. Enjoy the process. Mistakes are part of growth.
My goal wasn’t just to make a pretty image – it was to evoke a feeling: the burning sun, the dry air, the mystery of the horizon waiting to be discovered.
Before this, I had worked on smaller projects, mostly aimed at learning tools and getting familiar with the workflow. Desert Environment is the first project where I truly focused on atmosphere, storytelling, and artistic direction.