We begin the journey by laying the creative groundwork. This week introduces the fundamental principles of stylization and how it differs from realism. You’ll explore how to use exaggeration, color, shape language, and silhouette to create visually impactful environments that tell a story. We’ll also dive deep into visual storytelling and composition—understanding how to use camera framing, focal points, leading lines, and balance to guide the viewer’s eye through a scene. By the end of the week, you’ll have the artistic foundation needed to build compelling environments with purpose and clarity.

Now that you’ve developed a creative vision, it’s time to start building. This week is all about establishing the broad layout of your environment through blocking. You’ll work in Maya and Unreal Engine to plan the scale, proportions, and flow of your scene. Learn how to use primitive shapes to define key areas, compositions, and camera angles. We’ll also discuss how layout supports gameplay or narrative. This critical phase will ensure your final environment is readable, navigable, and visually engaging.

Trim sheets are the secret to professional modular design—and this week, you’ll learn exactly how to plan and sculpt one. You’ll design a high-resolution trim sheet that includes reusable shapes like panels, bolts, borders, and engravings, all tailored to your stylized theme. Emphasis will be placed on shape variety, bevel control, and surface exaggeration. You’ll explore both hand-sculpting in Maya and the use of supporting tools to enhance speed and style.

This week is focused on turning your high-poly sculpt into a production-ready asset. You’ll learn how to bake detailed texture maps including ambient occlusion, curvature, world normals, and thickness. Using Substance Designer, you’ll texture your trim sheet with stylized, hand-crafted details and vibrant color palettes. We’ll go over how to fix tile seams, unify visual language, and prepare your maps for real-time use in Unreal Engine.

With your trim sheet complete, it’s time to build your modular kit. This week you’ll model walls, floors, arches, beams, and props using your trim sheet to ensure texture consistency and minimal UV waste. We’ll explore how to design modular pieces that snap together easily and support variation. You’ll learn the art of kitbashing, mirroring, and instancing for efficiency and flexibility.

Nature brings life to your world—and this week is all about creating it. You’ll model stylized trees, leaves, and other foliage elements using custom workflows in Maya and SpeedTree. Special attention is given to leaf shape language, silhouette, and vertex normals for clean shading. You’ll also prepare your meshes for wind animation and dynamic response in Unreal.

Now we bring your foliage to life in Unreal Engine. You’ll build flexible leaf and bark materials that include wind simulation, vertex color blending, and custom tinting options. You’ll create stylized shaders that support translucency and edge softness, bringing warmth and richness to the foliage. We’ll also cover UE’s Foliage Tool and foliage instances for performance-friendly distribution.

This week focuses on procedural material creation using Substance Designer. You’ll create stylized textures such as cracked bricks, hand-carved cliffs, soft moss, and painterly ground surfaces. Learn how to use noise functions, gradients, slope blurs, and warps to develop rich surface detail. You’ll also build parameters into your materials, giving them flexibility when used in Unreal.

Polish makes the difference between good and great. This week, you’ll focus on the finer details: grunge decals, wear and tear, and micro storytelling. Learn to create and use decal materials in Unreal, build your own texture atlases for optimization, and apply subtle surface variation to break up repetition.

Lighting sets the mood—and this week, you’ll learn to master both day and night scenarios. You’ll explore how to create warm, soft stylized lighting using directional lights, skylights, fog, and bounce cards. Then, flip the scene into a magical night version with glowing accents and color contrast. You’ll explore light baking, dynamic shadows, and cinematic light rigging.

In this week, you’ll dive into Niagara, Unreal Engine’s powerful particle system. Learn to create magical Ghibli-style wind lines, glowing fireflies, chimney smoke, and other gentle ambient effects that bring your world to life. You’ll use ribbon renderers, noise masks, and animation curves to build subtle, stylized motion.

Create a hero piece with a hand-crafted stylized waterfall. Starting from the mesh in Maya, you’ll move into Unreal to create a dynamic shader with gradient masks, foam animation, and emissive edge glow. You’ll use world position offset to simulate motion and blend textures using panners and custom masks.

This week focuses on presentation. You’ll use post-processing to enhance your environment’s final look—tweaking bloom, depth of field, tone mapping, vignette, sharpening, and color grading. Learn how to finalize your lighting, polish your shaders, and set up your camera shots for rendering.

It’s time to wrap everything up. This final week is dedicated to polishing your scene, refining presentation, and exporting your final renders. You’ll composite your shots in DaVinci Resolve or your editing software of choice and prep them for ArtStation, The Rookies, or your personal portfolio.