Vít Chalany
PortfolioCZ

Environment artist · Czech Republic

Believable places,
built to ship.

European nature and grounded historical environments in Unreal Engine 5. Three modular kits on sale through Epic's marketplace, in use in other people's productions — and everything I learned making them, written down with the numbers attached.

Read the seriesSee the portfolio

Three running series

Each one numbered, open-ended, and about a problem I actually had.

01Shipping KitsHow a commercial environment kit actually gets made.Everything between "nice render" and "a studio bought this and shipped it". Spec, grid discipline, trim sheet planning, naming conventions, LODs, documentation, and Epic's technical review.1 part02Grown, Not PlacedVegetation, biomes and foliage that survives a frame budget.SpeedTree, Nanite foliage, wind, scatter and biome transitions — with profiler numbers, not vibes.1 part03Breaking the TileKilling visible texture repetition.Macro variation, cell bombing, distance blending and the Substance Designer authoring that makes breakup cheap. Unreal and Unity where it makes sense.1 part

Latest

All articles →
A Central European deciduous forest in Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite foliageGrown, Not Placed/01SpeedTree to Nanite foliageThere is almost no free, current, written resource for getting a SpeedTree asset into UE5 as Nanite foliage that actually performs. Here is the entire chain — export settings, the masked-to-opaque decision, wind, and what each step costs.A stone wall shown twice, once with obvious repeating tiles and once broken up with macro variationBreaking the Tile/01Why your wall looks tiledVisible repetition is not a texture-resolution problem, it is a spatial-frequency problem. Once you can name what your eye is catching, the cheapest fix is four nodes and about ten minutes.A modular cabin kit laid out on a grid against a plain background, with module dimensions annotatedShipping Kits/01Spec before modellingEvery modular kit I have shipped that went badly went badly for the same reason: I opened Blender before I knew what the modules were. Here is the one-page document I now write first, and the four decisions it forces.

Everything here
has been measured.

Every article states the engine version, shows the node graph with the node names as readable text, includes profiler numbers before and after, and says what I tried that did not work.

  • Real numbersProfiler output, not adjectives.
  • Stated versionsBecause "it depends" is not an answer.
  • Source filesCommented graphs, not screenshots.
  • Failure modesWhen the technique loses, and to what.

Reference

Texel density with a working calculator, trim sheet standards, modular grid conventions. Tables to bookmark, not essays to read once.

Open reference →

Kits

Three commercial modular environment kits, 113–116 unique meshes each, with the technical decisions behind them written up.

See the kits →

A new part when there is something to say

A new part of a series every two or three weeks, when there is something real to say. Never weekly — the two weekly newsletters in this niche both burned out.

Setup: put your beehiiv or Kit form endpoint insrc/consts.ts as NEWSLETTER_ACTION and this becomes a real form. beehiiv is free to 2,500 subscribers with a custom domain included.