The client builds driving simulation scenarios for professional training. Every scenario needs a different stretch of road with believable surroundings: houses, fences, yards, trees, all of it. They used to use real driving footage, but now they're moving everything into Unreal so they can change scenes on demand.

The problem wasn't making 3D assets. The problem was placing them. Artists kept doing the same thing over and over: drag a house, rotate it to face the road, repeat fifty times, then start on the fences. By the end of one road, they were tired. By the end of one scenario, they were burnt out.

That bottleneck became the design brief.

Developed as part of a collaborative Unreal Engine graduation project. While the road generation system was developed separately, my role focused on creating and integrating the procedural roadside environment systems around it. This included building rows, yards, fences, props, cluster-based house variation, artist-controlled parameters, and AI-assisted workflow controls.

A key part of my work was connecting these environment systems to the spline-based road framework so that houses and roadside elements could align correctly with straight and curved roads. This required solving spacing, offset, row length, intersection, and system-integration challenges to make the final tool behave as one connected production workflow.

Before writing any code, I ran structured interviews with environment artists and the client team to identify where time was lost and what an artist-facing tool actually needed.

"How can procedural systems automate roadside environment creation in Unreal Engine, while still letting environment artists stay in control?"

That's the question I tried to answer. From the interviews and a bunch of desk research on PCG, scatter systems and other simulation tools, six findings kept coming back. Each one turned into a real feature.

The system separates concerns across three layers. PCG Graphs handle road-side point sampling and pass data downstream. Blueprints consume those points to spawn and configure houses, yards, fences, props, and cluster groups. A C++ Editor Widget sits on top as an optional AI command layer, mapping natural language to parameter changes without touching the underlying generation logic.

Every parameter surfaces in the Details panel. Every result is deterministic and reproducible. Nothing the system generates is locked - artists can override, extend, or discard any generated element.

Each system in the tool addresses a specific production constraint identified during user research. Nothing was built speculatively.

Built entirely within Unreal Engine 5. PCG Framework for point sampling and road-side data distribution. Blueprint Construction Scripts for actor generation. C++ for the editor widget and AI integration layer. Standard DCC pipeline for asset preparation.

Six months. Two rounds of user testing. A lot of broken Blueprints in between.

Delivered to a real industry client. Validated through two rounds of user testing with environment artists.

The procedural tool is already an improvement on manual environment creation. But it still requires artists to learn what each parameter does. The AI layer adds a second doorway: if you know the sliders, use them. If you don't, just describe what you want.

Right now it's a prototype - it understands the vocabulary of this tool. The bigger direction is tools that explain themselves, adapt to the user's vocabulary, and make complex procedural systems accessible to artists who aren't technically minded.

Technical stack: Unreal C++ Editor Widget → HTTP request to configurable AI endpoint (local Ollama or external OpenAI-compatible API) → JSON response parsed by Blueprint → procedural properties updated in real time.

The existing ship assets in the Thales game lacked visual consistency - each ship had been textured differently, making them feel like they belonged to different games. The task was to establish a unified visual language across all naval vessels: a shared palette of grays, blacks, and reds, consistent dirt and wear layering, and material properties that read clearly in realtime.

Retextured five ships in Substance Painter: F221 HESSEN, F804 DE RUYTER, TYPE 45 DARING, D32, and DDG ZUMWALT. Each required individual analysis of reference photography and calibration against the target art direction. The result is a fleet that reads as a coherent set.

A complete Maya modeling and UV pipeline for a fishing boat asset - built from scratch to learn Maya during the internship, while simultaneously delivering a production-ready game asset. Clean topology, manual UV unwrapping, and Substance Painter texturing matched to the game's existing art direction.

Developed a system to simulate realistic weather conditions for realtime environments - built in Unity 6 URP as a Technical Art showcase demonstrating shader development, VFX systems, and procedural environment control.

The system features a procedural ocean mesh with 40,000+ vertices driven by layered sine wave animation and vertex-color foam. Two custom HLSL shaders were written from scratch: OceanWater.shader (URP Lit - fresnel edge glow, two-layer noise normals, depth fade via CameraDepthTexture, foam from vertex color) and CloudSky.shader (Unlit dome - 3-layer domain-warped FBM clouds, sky gradient, horizon fade).

Four weather states - Clear, Rain, Storm, Snow - are driven by a central C# WeatherController state machine with 3.5-second smooth transitions. Each state controls: directional light color and intensity, fog density and color, ambient light, ocean wave height and speed, ocean and cloud material properties, particle system emission rates, and camera background color.

Developed a VFX effect for a flying ship cannon projectile - a cannon trail and smoke effect built using Unity particle systems. The effect includes a high-speed projectile trail with motion blur, expanding smoke dissipation on impact, and layered particle emitters for realistic ballistic visual feedback.

The Thales internship was five months inside a professional production environment - real client, real sprints, real feedback loops. Every piece of work went through supervisor review before shipping into the game.

The primary technical contribution was shader development and VFX systems in Unity URP: custom HLSL shaders, Shader Graph weather shader variations, particle-based VFX including cannon trail and projectile smoke effects, rain ripple systems, and the Unity Weather Shader System - a full procedural weather environment with four animated weather states (Clear, Rain, Storm, Snow), procedural ocean mesh, cloud dome shader, and C# state machine driving all transitions.

3D asset production was an additional contribution: learning Maya from scratch and building a fishing boat asset with clean topology, manual UV unwrapping, and bake-ready preparation for Substance Painter. Texturing work covered generator-based workflows - dirt masks, metal edge generators, and alpha painting for production surface details.