Visual Archive

"Zone 01 // Promenade (40° 46' 18.5" N • 73° 58' 20.1" W)"

When Olmsted and Vaux laid out The Mall, they deliberately cut it at an oblique angle to Manhattan's street grid so the commercial geometry of the city would dissolve the second you stepped under the trees. Reconstructing that living cathedral solo in Unreal Engine meant solving the asset pipeline first. I didn't want bespoke static props cluttering disk, so every bench and path run began as lightweight USD packs (path_narrow.usd) driving procedural splines with zero tiling artifacts. The real breakthrough came down to memory. Benches usually demand four separate material slots: weathered wood slats, cast-iron armrests, steel bolts, and the brass plaque. On a four-year-old laptop with 6GB of VRAM, that draw call count across the entire promenade was lethal. While building our custom Substance batch-baker, I realized the alpha channel on our packed 2K OCT (Occlusion, Curvature, Thickness) maps was sitting idle. Routing a grayscale Material ID into that spare channel collapsed all four bench slots down to a single material and 1 draw call, saving thousands of calls while pulling roughly 22MB of VRAM. This is Issue 01 of Project WhiteTree, captured across our three-pass Ouranos lighting setup so you can see the raw pavement under overcast skies, rim light at dawn, and cast-iron fixtures at midnight looking out toward the distant San Remo spires. — Rael... Jibrael

"Zone 02 // Connective Trails & Ramble (40° 46' 22.0" N • 73° 58' 14.5" W)"

Realism in nature doesn't come from the big shapes; it comes from the believable mess on the ground. For The Literary Walk, I threw out static ground textures. The understory is seeded by millions of procedurally scattered micro-assets: curled oak leaves, clover clumps, snapped twigs, and cherry blossom petals piling up against the curb edges. To stop the CPU from bottlenecking during runtime generation, I wrote custom HLSL PCG nodes running a SIMD four-way fast hash to evaluate four points in parallel on the GPU. Above that forest floor sits FXRunner Iota, our Niagara falling-leaf system. Instead of firing continuous particle emitters across the entire 170 acres, Iota generates deterministic leaf fall per tree crown and only spawns within an active radius around the camera. Leaves flutter with custom turbulence noise and land precisely on the secondary spline paths without wasting a single simulation cycle. To connect this zone to the Ramble, a modular narrow path spline system (path_narrow.usd) generates curved road slabs, curb transitions, and asphalt runoff profiles along live curves, calculating continuous procedural UVs on the fly so there are zero visible texture seams. — Rael... Jibrael

"Zone 03 // Waterfront & Running Track (40° 47' 06.0" N • 73° 57' 38.0" W)"

Studying long-lens telephoto reference photos around Engineers' Gate revealed something impossible to ignore: real park fences are never straight. Decades of freeze-thaw cycles, tree roots, and human contact bend iron pickets into subtle organic waves and warps. Once I saw the wobble in the reference photography, I couldn't unsee it. Hand-authoring dozens of warped fence variants was never going to scale, and early Nanite displacement tests were unstable and tore the geometry. The fix was an uber-deformation shader using 3D simplex noise to displace fence vertices procedurally in world space via World Position Offset (WPO). The catch: evaluating 3D noise on thousands of fence pickets across a 1.58-mile loop crushed frame rates on my laptop's RTX 3060. Introducing a strict per-mesh disable distance cutoff saved the project. Close to the lens, the metal has decades of character; beyond the cutoff, the calculation shuts down cleanly, locking the scene at a solid 60 FPS without popping. The water is driven by FXRunner Triton, combining four overlapping Gerstner wave vectors with procedural micro-ripples, distance-based shoreline depth fading, and turbidity controls. In the late afternoon, the reservoir acts as a 106-acre mirror, reflecting the silhouettes of Fifth Avenue and Central Park West while autumn cherry blossoms catch the setting sun along the perimeter. — Rael... Jibrael

"Zone 04 // Historic Crossing & Architecture (40° 46' 35.8" N • 73° 58' 18.2" W)"

Calvert Vaux's Bridge No. 28, built in 1864, is one of the most intricate cast-iron structures in Central Park. The ornate Gothic quatrefoils and scrollwork were modeled to millimeter precision and brought into Unreal Engine as a 2.4-million triangle Nanite mesh. No normal map baking compromises, no geometric silhouette faceting against the sky, and zero LOD pop-in as you walk beneath the arch. Weathering on this scale shouldn't look painted on; it should look like decades of rain and freeze-thaw cycles arguing with the stone. The masonry relies on ShaderRunner2069's "MaskRunner" blends. By evaluating baked ambient occlusion alongside live distance fields, the material dynamically grows damp green moss deep inside stone crevices and deposits dark mineral runoff beneath the ledges. When the midnight lighting kicks on, warm incandescent luminaires spill across the wet bridle path, catching Fresnel reflections in every puddle. "How do I build the system, not just the thing?" WhiteTree was an attempt to prove a solo technical artist could reconstruct 170 acres of Central Park as an authored, living ecosystem on a four-year-old laptop. Splines carve the topography, PCG volumes seed the understory, and packed ubershaders keep VRAM disciplined enough to hold 60 FPS. — Rael... Jibrael

"Zone 05 // Modular Unreal Material Library, USD Pipelines & Automated DCC Tooling"

A Modular Unreal Material Library, USD Pipelines & Automated DCC Tooling Reconstructing 170 acres of Central Park in real time is a fast way to discover the limits of traditional environment texturing. Baking bespoke textures for hundreds of benches, lampposts, and retaining walls quickly detonates your VRAM budget and turns asset iteration into a grind. I built ShaderRunner to move that burden into Unreal Engine 5.7. Clean procedural stone authored in Substance Designer tiles across the park, while a 5-stage runtime layer stack evaluates surface abrasion, cavity grime, canopy dust, and rainwater moss directly in engine without a single rebake. To eliminate the prep bottleneck, I wrote AutoBaker—a headless Python CLI tool that automates Substance batch baking across our modular USD kits. It extracts raycasts, packs Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, Thickness, and Material IDs into single 4-channel OCT maps, dumps them into the Unreal project tree, and purges intermediate TGAs automatically. Routing multi-surface assets through single-slot topology collapsed draw calls by 75% on promenade benches (from 160 calls down to 40), preserving vital frametime for Lumen and Nanite foliage. The full breakdown slides and sequential GIF pipelines are documented above. — Rael... Jibrael

"Zone 06 // Procedural Architecture, Gaea Geomorphology & Spline Tooling"

Hey everyone. When you're trying to build 170 acres of Central Park solo, hand-placing half a million trees and manually digging every road trench is a great way to never finish a project. This issue is the deep dive into the procedural backbone that made it possible to build the park without melting my laptop’s GPU. Instead of fighting Unreal’s landscape by hand, I ran the macro geology through Gaea for physical rainfall and sediment accumulation, then brought it into non-destructive UE5 landscape edit layers. Along the paths, I built custom spline tools that dynamically carve the ground, snap curbs, and slice clean junctions without messy mesh booleans. For the scatter, top-down canopy rules handle the mature Elms while a custom 4-way SIMD HLSL noise module evaluates 500,000 instances of ground clutter in under two milliseconds. At the end of the day, all 45,000 trees and foliage props collapse down to 310 draw calls, running locked at 60 FPS under full dynamic Lumen and Nanite on a 6GB RTX 3060. Swipe through the slides for the node graphs, fixed-camera assembly stages, and runtime profiling passes. Hope you enjoy the breakdown. — Rael... Jibrael

"19th-century Parisian architecture engineered for performant real-time game engines."

A deep dive into the ornament, relief, and proportions of 19th-century neoclassical Parisian architecture, engineered for performant real-time game engines. Neoclassical facades live and die by their relief; everything here was sculpted and kitbashed around a low-angle golden hour lighting model that catches deep window arches, heavy rustication, and carved entablatures. To solve the real-world friction of environmental design, I wrote custom headless Python tools to batch-bake mesh maps inside Substance Designer via the command line. Offloading manual baking out of the loop let me iterate on multi-tiered rustication stacks and layered master material instances without losing momentum. — Rael... Jibrael

"Three distinct architectural eras unified by non-destructive procedural pipelines."

A tripartite technical study exploring three completely different architectural eras under a single unifying rule: non-destructive pipelines built to keep production sustainable. The deck documents the procedural networks, modular snap-kits, and material science driving each world. Across IronLake (modern alpine geology and Gaea erosion), Apollo (1:1 classical Greek monument recreation), and Belvédère (1930s luxury European rail travel), the procedural networks build the structure, but the details give it a soul. — Rael... Jibrael

"Two years of late-night R&D, personal specimens, and curiosity getting completely out of hand."

An uncommissioned archive of 10 personal specimens spanning 2024–2025 across 30 monograph slides. Documenting the late-night R&D, impulsive experiments, and accidental rabbit holes that happen between production deadlines. What began as casual curiosity routinely spiraled out of hand: deciding to model a horse turned into sculpting all 205 bones in a full flight-phase gallop at 12M DynaMesh; an evening looking at raw denim escalated into warp and weft stiffness coefficient sims; and watching a movie led directly to grooming 240,000 hair curves. Every specimen was an excuse to stress-test Sub-D topology, shrinkwrap guide meshes, and physical material science. — Rael... Jibrael