The Submarine

Overview

The Submarine is a game-ready interior environment built as a personal project to explore cinematic mood and atmospheric lighting in a real-time context. The scene is Inspired by the aesthetic of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Emiel Sleegers' submarine interior reference work.

The Scene

A tight industrial corridor dense with pipes, valves, and structural panels, lit with a deep red volumetric pass designed to make the space feel both claustrophobic, alarming and alive.

Asset Pipeline

All assets modeled in Blender and textured in Substance Painter. The paint weathering on the walls and structural panels was built as a custom tileable material in Substance Designer, using layered dirt, rust bleed, and chipped paint masks to drive the aged industrial look consistently across the scene without repeating texture patterns. Everything else used standard Substance Painter material layering for the surface detail.

Lighting

The scene uses a dominant red volumetric fill to create depth and unease in the corridor. The lighting mood was the main focus of the project alongside the modular workflow.

Render Passes

Cinematic

What I Learned

Working on The Submarine gave me a clearer sense of how to manage a large interior environment inside Unreal Engine 5. The scene required careful modular modeling and material instancing to stay performant. I also learned that spending more time on reference gathering and mood research at the beginning made the final lighting and atmosphere come together with less hurdles.