Hey everyone!
I’ve finally finished my Venice map I’ve been working on for around 1 year and 1000 hours using Unreal 5.4 and some of the newest techniques such as Nanite displacement, Lumen and the Material Layer System.
You can check it out here: ArtStation - Venice Map
Thank you! 
Hi there @Flowlee_Art,
Welcome to the Unreal Engine forums! So nice to see a new face around here. Hope you’re well and having a great week so far
This is absolutely stunning. Wow. It feels like a grand palace from a fairytale. Nothing quite like Italian architecture. You’re done such a truly impressive job. Especially for a healthy 1000 hours of work. Do you plan on creating more projects similar to this one or are you taking a break after this one?
Hi @PresumptivePanda !
Thank you for the warm welcome and the nice words!
After the breakdown of this one I will take a small break to try to get a job in the games industry. Then the plan is to work on some smaller projects, I really want to learn Houdini as well. This project was extremely big and at some points I thought I’m not able to finnish it as I was learning Substance Designer, Painter, Maya and zBrush for the first time as well as all these workflows and techniques. This is why it took a 1000 hours at the end. 
Large projects are often the best teachers. So many rad software’s to learn. I think this turned out great for a “learning” project. I look forward to seeing what you create next after your break.
Looks fab! 
If you have a YouTube fly-though please share, as Artstation links are blocked (thanks cloudflare). Curious to learn more about your original goals as well. Like how you decided how much of Venice was realistic to take on vs level of realism wanted??? Cheers
Hey, thanks! I uploaded a walkthrough to Vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/1004429849
Actually in the beginning, I underestimated what I’ve made in the blockout. Later on my plan was to just finnish the side of the canal where the palace was in and ignore the other.
Funny thing is: one night I couldn’t sleep because I’ve thought too much about my project. I stood up at 2 am in the morning and went to my PC. In this night I’ve completely made the other side (which I thought would be too much time ), ignored my previous blockout and resused a bunch of buildings I already made and created one new, which was fairly easy with all the assets I had from the other buildings.
About realism, for a while I wasn’t sure how realistic my style should be. But I just kept going and added to it. In the end, I think it came out pretty naturally.
