Creating an Environment to Capture the Atmosphere of the Back Alleys of Vietnam

Introduction

Hello, my name is Lenz Monath, and I am currently working as a Senior Environment Artist at Embark Studios in Stockholm, working on THE FINALS. My journey into 3D art began in 2006 with Valve's Hammer Editor. Like many in this industry, I had that one game that changed my trajectory in life: the first time I saw the E3 demos of Half-Life 2.

Seeing that level of physicality and world-building offered a glimpse into what games could become, and I've been chasing that excitement ever since. It has served as a compass throughout my career. While in high school, I was laser-focused on developing my portfolio and building the skills necessary to eventually reach a hireable position.

After graduation, I attended a game design school, and while the formal curriculum was modest, it provided the time I needed to contribute to successful Counter-Strike maps like de_cache and further refine my craft. I eventually took a break from my studies to work for Yager in Berlin, which later led me to DICE in Stockholm to work on Battlefield.

It was there that I met the incredibly talented group of people who later left to found Embark, and I feel deeply honored to still be creating alongside them today.

Saigon Alley Project

Saigon Alley was born from my frequent travels to Vietnam, the birthplace of my partner at the time. Visiting family there offered me a unique "behind the curtain" look at everyday life in the major cities. I became fascinated by the sheer energy of the people and the architectural layers of the urban landscape.

While my partner spent time with family, I would disappear into the "hẻm". The countless, labyrinthine back alleys that weave through the city. The sharp contrast between the sensory overload of the main roads and the surprising peace of the backstreets struck me.

Once you step into a hẻm, the pace changes entirely. You still hear the muffled domesticity of people going about their chores, but the energy is different. I also fell in love with the architecture's specific "tropical modernism". Those long, narrow "tube houses" give Vietnamese cities their distinct verticality.

My goals for the project were two-fold:

• Artistic Authenticity: I wanted to recreate the soul of those spaces, staying true to the atmosphere I experienced rather than just making a "generic" city street.
• Technical Freedom: I wanted to challenge myself to push visual quality further than typical production restrictions that work allow. It was an exercise in seeing how far I could go without a performance budget hanging over my head.

Coming from DICE and Embark, working closely with reference is second nature to me. Beyond standard vacation photos, I approached the trip as a scout, capturing specific photogrammetry scans and detailed reference kits of materials, weathering patterns, and prop clusters to ensure the final environment felt lived-in and truthful.

Workflow

For the composition, I started with a rough blockout of the entire environment, specifically focusing on the camera path. My goal was to create a seamless loop that felt like a labyrinth, a space with no clear beginning or end, mirroring the disorienting, tucked-away feel of the real "hẻm."

My workflow was heavily photogrammetry-driven. I wanted to base as much content as possible on my own scans, which provided the high-fidelity grounding and material coherence I was after. This was also my primary "time-saving trick": by capturing high-quality real-world data, I spent less time "guessing" at forms and textures and more time on the final integration. I followed an iterative approach:

• Initial Blockout: Establishing the flow and silhouettes.
• Foundation Pass: Moving from the entrance to the exit, replacing blockout geo with my processed scans and primary architectural meshes.
• The Detail & "Lived-in" Pass: Once the bones were there, I went back through to add the smaller layers, the plaster weathering, posters, and garbage, ensuring the density felt consistent across the entire loop.

To keep the walls from looking repetitive, I used a mix of blended plaster shaders and a ton of scanned decals to break up the "tube house" facades. For the posters and street-level clutter, I focused on "storytelling clusters", placing garbage and decals where they would naturally accumulate in these narrow spaces, rather than scattering them randomly.

Retopology and Texturing

I opted to keep the base geometry of the houses relatively simple, allowing the shaders and high-fidelity materials to do the heavy lifting. To streamline the production of these architectural meshes, I set up a Geometry Nodes network in Blender that would automatically generate UVs based on triplanar projection. This ensured a perfectly consistent texel density across the whole alley.

This approach offered the best of both worlds: I could rapidly iterate on the architecture in Blender, but because the network baked the coordinates into actual UVs, I didn't have to rely on expensive triplanar shader setups in-engine. This kept the material instruction count low without sacrificing the visual quality of the large-scale surfaces.

Working in Blender was a major advantage for a solo project. It allowed me to write custom Python scripts and small helpers to handle the "boring" repetitive tasks that usually eat up a weekend. By automating the technical overhead, I could spend my limited spare time focusing on the creative side: the lighting, the storytelling, and the atmosphere.

To achieve the realistic look of Saigon Alley, I leaned into a photogrammetry-first workflow. My goal was to capture the specific, aged data of the "hẻm". How humidity affects plaster and how grime settles into the architecture.

• From Field to Engine: The process began on location using RealityScan to process my photo sets into high-quality meshes and textures. I then used Substance 3D Sampler to delight the assets, stripping away environmental lighting to get a clean, neutral Albedo.
• Refining in Substance 3D Designer: I brought the cleaned scans into Substance 3D Designer to standardize the PBR maps. My philosophy was to respect the source material. I used Substance 3D Designer primarily to create seamless tiling and ensure consistent Roughness and Normal maps across my modular pieces.
• Layering with Decals: To break up tiling repetition, I used a library of photogrammetry-based decals. I treated these as a storytelling layer, placing water leaks where tropical rain would collect and layering local advertisements over the walls to add micro-detail.

By starting with RealityScan data and using Substance 3D tools only to "repair" and "tile" that data, I was able to retain the organic cracks and stains that give an environment its soul.

Assembling the Final Scene

Rather than chasing "bombastic" or cinematic hero shots, I wanted the final scene to feel grounded and mundane. My goal was to recreate the specific, lived-in vignettes and micro-compositions I witnessed while roaming Vietnam.

• Vignettes and Micro-compositions: I treated the environment as a series of smaller focal points and subthemes. This kept the alley visually engaging as the camera traveled along its path, without exhausting the viewer with constant high-frequency detail.
• Practical Placement: I avoided detailing for the sake of detailing. Instead, I carefully placed assets where they made sense for the narrative, cluttered utility meters, tangled wiring, and specific arrangements of street-level garbage.
• Visual Balance: By focusing on these smaller vignettes, I could maintain a coherent environment as a whole. It allowed me to control the "rest areas" for the eye, ensuring that the densest areas of the alley felt earned and purposeful.

Ultimately, I wanted to capture the authentic rhythm of the "hẻm". The quiet moments between the buildings feel personal and private, even in a dense urban landscape.

Lighting

My goal was to keep the lighting rigs relatively simple and let the environment's materials and geometry handle the light naturally within Unreal Engine 5.

The "Digicam" Inspiration: A major creative driver for this project was an old Fuji FinePix digital camera I brought on my last trip. I used it to capture lighting references, specifically to see how those early sensors reacted to light. I wanted to recreate that specific sense of nostalgia, the way the bloom hits, the balance between deep shadows, and how those highlights blow out. 

My lighting scenarios were:

• Daylight: I relied on a Directional Light and a Skylight. The key was balancing the exposure between the harsh, direct sun and the deep, shaded pockets of the alley.
• Overcast: Most of the light came from a Skylight for a soft, flat base. I used subtle spotlights to accentuate specific areas, simulating moments where the sun might break through the clouds to guide the composition.
• Night: This was the most liberating phase. I used Megalights to place numerous local light sources without performance constraints. I focused on the "clash" between the warm, orange glow of old street lamps and the harsh, cold LED lights spilling from windows.

Conclusion

For the post-production and custom shaders, I kept the standard post-processing quite light, preferring to handle the "look" through custom materials. I added a fisheye lens distortion post-process material and, with the help of AI, wrote a custom HLSL shader to mimic the specific quirks of an early 2000s digicam.

This shader handled the clipping of highlights, subtle chromatic aberration, and intentional JPEG artifacts. These technical imperfections were essential to move away from a "clean" CGI look and toward something that felt like a captured memory.

Lenz Monath, Senior Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine