A little over 10 years ago, when I was first learning Unreal Engine 4, I built a small environment inspired by the Pyramid of Power from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
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With the 40th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, I thought it would be fun to come back to that idea and rebuild it with everything I have learned since.

The scene itself is pretty small and simple. The idea was to keep it reminiscent of older top-down dungeon crawlers, almost somewhere between A Link to the Past and a classic Diablo-style presentation, and use that as a sandbox to focus mostly on the materials. All of the surfaces were built in Substance 3D Designer. I created the individual stone, tile, wear and damage elements separately, then layered everything together in Designer to build the final floor treatment.

In Unreal Engine 5, I used Mesh Painting to control where different surface states appear and combined that with Nanite Tessellation to push some of the larger cracks, broken edges and tile separation into actual displaced surface detail.

A lot of the project was really just experimenting with how much variation I could get out of a relatively small set of reusable materials.
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The original SNES artwork is incredibly graphic and simple, so the fun part was trying to keep some of that readability while figuring out what those shapes might look like as more believable materials.

I especially wanted to avoid turning everything into one giant bespoke texture. Most of the work came down to building simple surfaces that could layer together, then spending way too much time adjusting wear, edge breakup, color variation and displacement until everything felt right.
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I just wanted to revisit an old project and see where I stand then versus now.