Zaha in the Tundra - Carlos Puebla

Architecture in environment

This project blends the creation of an impressive environment such as the Tundra, presenting Zaha Hadid's first international building, which achieves dynamism by using concrete blocks for the structure.

Planning and Layout

I wanted to create an architecture that blends in with a striking environment with large mountains, Zaha Hadid's building was an example of large horizontal structures with rigid materials, but at the same time giving dynamism with contrasting angles.

Modeling and Texturing

The Building

For the building I used hand-drawn plans as a reference, as it was built in 1993. Using Google Earth I was able to find out the distance between the walls, to get dimensions more similar to the original building. I also used reference images to determine the height, having a person of 180 cm with respect to the walls.

I used 3ds Max for modelling using mainly Smart Extrude techniques, and extracted the UVs for texturing directly in Unreal Engine 5.

The Environment

For the creation of environments I used the parametric tool World Creator, which allowed me to adjust not only the terrain, but also the distribution of materials, creating opacity masks that I would later use in Unreal to have more complexity in the landscape.

The filter function allowed me to adjust the terrain to a higher level of detail, once I had created the style of the mountains and valleys.

Scene Assembly, Lighting and Look Development

UNREAL ENGINE 5

The new features of Unreal Engine 5 allowed me to import a lot of Quixel Assets by activating Nanite for large objects, and using Lumen to get a more natural indirect lighting with the exponential height fog.

Conclusions 

A great way to learn new software is to imagine a large project by putting together techniques you know and trying different ones to improve productivity and understand the fundamentals.

Thank you for coming to this point and I hope you have liked the project!

I would be grateful if you could give your comments to continue improving and you can find me at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlos-puebla-herrero/