Stardust Shoals is an excercise in creating a 3D environment in the Unreal Engine. I used a combination of my own custom 3D models, and ones that I found online to fill the scene, and I used the landscaping tools in Unreal 5.5 in order to construct the environment.

I wanted to create an environment that felt both stylized and naturalistic, and I achieved this primarily through my use of materials. The wind effects on both the grass and palm tree leaves are generated using Unreal's node based material system. This was able to help the environment feel less static through the use of movement, while being much lighter performance wise than a physics system would have been.

This sort of optimization is really important to me, as it allows the creation of beautiful and detailed environments at lower computing costs. Working on this project allowed me to practice techniques like this, and apply them to a finished product that I'm proud of.