The field expedition
Remnants from another time
In my setting, scientists announced a breakthrough in space-time research in 3035. Early that year they managed to send an object no larger than a letter into the past and retrieve it. Afterwards, people began finding things that did not belong to their surroundings, from the skeletons of ancient creatures to buildings in the styles of lost civilisations.
I imagined the player as part of a field team trying to learn where these remnants came from and what happened around them. Rainforest is one of the sites in that premise. I used the environment to show the first encounter with a structure that feels far older than the investigation itself.
Visual research
Stone geometry under the canopy
For the ruins I looked at ancient Babylonian architecture, picking out squared masses, arches, trapezoidal outlines and layers of walls. I wanted a recognisable built geometry to emerge through the dense forest. For the terrain I looked at rivers and streams, wet ground, roots, vines, stones and shrubs, as well as the small animals that could occupy those spaces.
I also gathered images of mechanisms and wreckage to explore what an object out of place might look like. For the atmosphere I looked at dark spaces crossed by narrow shafts of light, using that contrast to think about how much of the site to reveal at once.
Sketch to 3D environment
Establishing the scale
In the sketch I placed a small figure low in the frame and tipped the masonry across the view. The figure gives the ruin a scale, while the overhanging roots and vines close in around the path. In the Blender blockout I simplified those shapes into large dark masses against pale vertical forms to check the opening and the depth behind it.
A wet landscape at ground level
I imagined a lake in this part of the forest, with birds that favour wet habitats gathering nearby. In Unreal Engine, I set up grass, rock and sand as separate terrain layers so I could blend the surfaces where they meet. I also looked at the scene closer to the character, where the grass and dark foreground frame the route and the pale light picks out the trunks behind.
Final environment
Four views of the same ruin
I kept the forest and the stone mostly in shadow, with pale pink light behind the tall trunks and a warm glow inside the arch. A small cool light near the figure sets up a second point of attention. From ground level, the figure makes the arch feel larger. From above, the pools and slopes show how the site fits into the terrain. A view from behind the trees lets the ruin come into sight in pieces.