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Preview2 — Description

https://youtu.be/EipvxsboAzU?si=27T13z4R_D50w52x

Level Showcase — In-House Project on Unreal Engine 5.7
Sharing a small level my team and I built for our own project in Unreal Engine 5.7.
I previously posted a character for this project on LinkedIn, but I got stuck on its design — so I decided to shift the team's focus toward the environment while I keep iterating on the character in the background.
Project Goals
This was never just about the final image on screen — it was about growth, both as a team and personally. The key goals I set for myself:
- Team management — learning to build the process: distributing tasks, giving clear feedback, and keeping people with different areas of responsibility in sync.
- Learning and applying AI — getting hands-on with AI tools and integrating them into a real production pipeline, not just using them as a checkbox.
- Pipeline optimization — cutting down on routine and speeding up the work, including through in-house add-ons and a semi-procedural approach to assets.
- Working through the full cycle — going from blockout and modeling all the way to shaders, characters, rendering, and final edit, to understand how the stages connect.
- Portfolio and team showreel — putting together material that shows a production-level scene, not just isolated assets.
About the Project
I'm Azamat Burbaev https://www.artstation.com/burbaev — I put the team together and coordinated the process: giving feedback, assigning tasks, and personally handling the modeling of props and environment modules while assembling the scene in-engine.
On the technical side, I took on:
- authoring all of the scene's shaders;
- creating all of the atlases;
- the MetaHuman clothing pipeline: a single outfit (originally made a year ago) is simulated with Chaos in UE, after which the weights are refined by hand — this lets the outfit fit and work correctly on other
characters without re-simulating from scratch;
- the characters, built from the team members themselves via MetaHuman Identity;
- rendering the scene;
- animating the camera flythroughs.
The pipeline ended up being semi-procedural: most of the static modular assets are done through vertex-color baking, with the coloring handled by a shader — this made it possible to quickly vary the look of the
modules without manually repainting textures. Some assets were reused from last year's project, while the animated and physics-driven assets were made uniquely for each case.
Along the way I also built two add-ons that speed up the pipeline.
The Team
Ruslan Gostev — built the corridor with barrels, several props, and the cloth pieces scattered across the level, helped with testing the add-ons, and also handled the editing of the final video. https://www.artstation.com/pepsieze56
Denis Ishkov — helped with the modules for the large room with the central column. https://www.artstation.com/user-9525184
Vadim Akchulpanov — programmer, helped with integrating the FPS preset. We'll later share a video of the character running through the location, along with the weapon made for the project.
What's Next
- Render showcase;
- Technical breakdown;
- Level walkthrough;
- Level with enemy encounters.