Maintenance Hangar

The problem

A hangar has to read as enormous, and it has to read as functional. Those two goals fight each other: the scale that makes a space impressive is exactly what makes it repetitive and expensive to texture, and a big open volume gives the player no obvious route through it.

So the brief I set myself had three constraints. The space had to feel massive and lived-in. Player pathing had to stay legible without signage doing all the work. And the whole thing had to stay inside a texture budget that a real-time scene could actually afford.

A kit, not a set

Rather than model the hangar as a single environment, I built a modular kit — structural trusses, floor gridding and wall panels designed to snap together on a consistent grid.

The practical payoff is texel density. Because every piece is authored against the same grid and the same unwrap rules, surface detail stays consistent everywhere in the environment instead of drifting as the space expands. It also means the hangar can grow: adding another bay is assembly, not modelling.

One trim sheet instead of many bakes

The texturing approach is the decision I would defend hardest. Instead of unique bakes for every structural beam and wall panel, I authored a single 4K trim sheet in Substance 3D Painter containing corrugated metal, cable bundles, bolted seams and non-directional grunge.

Modular pieces — the yellow crane supports, the ceiling trusses — are then unwrapped to specific coordinates on that sheet. The result is detail that reads as bespoke across the entire hangar while resolving to a single material ID.

Tiling trims do have a tell: repetition. I broke that up with deferred decals for floor markings and safety warnings, which lets me put specific, narrative wear exactly where the composition needs it without adding a texture set.

Lighting as navigation

Lumen handles real-time global illumination, but the lighting design is doing a navigational job. Bright work lights pick out the central maintenance platform, which is where I want the eye to land first.

Under the walkways I let contrast go deep. Those shadows add the depth and industrial grime the space needs, and the brightness gradient between them and the platform is what tells a player which way is "in".

A spline Blueprint for the transit tube

The curved transit tube running through the background is not modelled by hand. I built a Blueprint that instances and deforms static meshes along a 3D spline: I move the spline points, and it recalculates how many segments are needed and handles their orientation and spacing.

This is the kind of Blueprint work I do — tooling that removes repetitive placement from the art process, rather than gameplay programming.

Making scale legible

Large environments lose their sense of size without a human reference. Traffic cones, crates and terminal stations are placed specifically to give the viewer something whose real-world size they already know, which is what makes the crane supports and trusses read as massive.

The composition uses a high-angle perspective so the floor layout and overhead gantries are both visible, with the floor markings and the horizontal transit tube acting as leading lines into the depth of the scene.