Mumbai Chawl : The Forgotten Courtyard

Mumbai Chawl: The Forgotten Courtyard is my Master’s final environment art project, created at the University of Staffordshire over a 12-week production period. The scene is inspired by traditional Mumbai chawl architecture and the Mumbai map from the Hitman game.

This project was a major technical and artistic learning experience for me. My main focus was on building a modular environment pipeline, optimizing assets for real-time performance, and creating strong visual storytelling through lighting and composition.

I used a layered material system in Unreal Engine 5, combining tiling textures, vertex painting, and RGB masking to achieve efficient material blending and visual variation across the scene. The entire environment was built using a fully modular workflow, allowing for fast iteration and flexibility during production.

The goal of this project was to sharpen my environment art, sculpting, and texturing skills, while also developing a stronger understanding of professional real-time workflows and optimization. Great care was taken to capture a sense of cultural authenticity, atmosphere, and lived-in detail.

A huge thank you to my mentor, @Human Esmaeili, for his constant guidance, support, and feedback throughout the project. The daily reporting workflow helped me stay consistent, accountable, and gave me a real sense of working in a professional game art pipeline.
Special thanks as well to @Daniel Cormino for the detailed layered material setup walkthrough, which was incredibly helpful during production.

All assets in this scene were created by me, with the exception of:

The foliage atlas, sourced from Megascans

A few image-based decals, sourced from online resources

Rendered in Unreal Engine 5.