Dealers Safehouse
A 90s-era interior environment depicting a recently abandoned drug dealer’s hideout. The scene captures a lived-in, gritty atmosphere through detailed props, textures, and lighting, bringing the story of the space to life.
Key features
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Custom Unreal decal material improving on Unity’s texture atlas decal system.
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UDIM workflow for walls and carpets, allowing dirt and grime to be generated in Substance Painter which adheres to the surrounding assets.
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All assets and environment elements created from scratch.
Software
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Maya
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ZBrush
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Substance Painter
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Photoshop
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Unreal Engine
Challenges and solutions
Improving the Decal System in Unreal Engine
Unity’s built-in decal system allows for the use of a texture atlas, but requires manual calculations for positioning, which can be irritating. Unreal Engine doesn't have one by default.
Solution:
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I created a custom decal material in Unreal with user-friendly grid-based parameters.
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The material allows artists to input a grid size (e.g., 4x4), automatically adjusting the X and Y values within correct bounds. This eliminated the need for manual calculations, making decal placement using a texture atlas, not only possible, but faster and intuitive.
Dirt and Grime Using UDIMs
Achieving realistic dirt accumulation that is baked onto the environment - this being walls, floor and ceiling.
Solution:
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After locking in the placement of most of the mid to large scale assets in the room, they were exported and combined into one huge asset.
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The trick then was to give them (as one combined asset) a different material ID to the surrounding walls and bring them into substance painter with the walls.
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This allowed me to utilise the baked information to create accurate layers of dirt and grime on the environment.
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This process is slightly time consuming so it was best to do this as a final polish pass.
Final Results & Impact
The Safehouse project showcases a deep understanding of real-time environment art, with a focus on efficient material creation, and storytelling through environment design. The custom decal system and UDIM-based dirt mapping add a layer of technical sophistication, making the project an ideal fit for game-ready environments or cinematic scenes.
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