Hi everyone!
I'm an aspiring environment artist. I decided to share the process of creating a new work for my portfolio. The main goal of the project is to gain experience in environment creation and level layout.
The project is a two-story house inspired by the houses from the Hillcrest chapter of The last of us 2 and the interior spaces from Resident Evil games - especially the opening house in RE8
Exterior

Second floor

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Back with an update! I’ve finished exporting all models to UE5 and placing them in the scene. I also fixed the scale of the walls and door frames. Still exploring ideas for space blocking and filling empty areas to make scene navigation more engaging.




I’ve finally figured out a proper and convenient way to import instanced models from Blender to UE5, so they can later be converted to instances inside Unreal.
I also started collecting references for props and textures. Did a speedrun through RE7 and RE8 to grab screenshots for inspiration.





Here’s a scene from RE8 that I’m using as a reference for the interior
and here’s a house from TLOU2 that inspired the exterior
As for new content — I’ve modeled the baseboard, cornice, dado rail, and wall paneling
Back again!
Most of the work over the last 4 days happened on paper, not in-engine. I put together a rough prop list to populate the scene — about 50 core items, but many of them will have variations (like different tables and chairs). So yeah, I’ve basically signed myself up for a fun little adventure of modeling 150+ unique assets. Thankfully, most of them are pretty simple and small in shape and material.
As for in-engine progress — I identified some boring/empty areas and added points of interest. For example, there's now a wardrobe space right near the entrance

Some marked spots are still empty though — haven’t found a nice and logical idea for them yet.
I also started filling in the last room on the first floor — the bedroom

And as you can see, I threw some materials on the meshes to get a rough idea of the scene’s color palette.

Next up: time to dive into prop modeling. To speed things up, I’ll try to find schematics or solid reference images for each item — the less guessing, the better