From Minecraft Worlds to AAA Environments: Jeon Hyeonyong’s Journey

Could you briefly introduce yourself and your background as an environment artist?

Hello, my name is Jeon Hyeonyong. I’m 28 years old and currently based in South Korea.

I have around 17 months of professional experience, and I’m working as an Environment Texture Artist at NEXON Games, where I focus on creating high-quality environments for console titles.

How did you first get into environment art?

I have always enjoyed drawing, building, and assembling things since I was very young. From playing with LEGO in kindergarten to building plastic models and doing origami, I naturally gravitated toward creative activities.

My direct entry point into environment art began with Minecraft. I became fascinated by the idea of freely creating massive worlds without physical limitations, spending countless hours building large structures and landscapes. Wanting to present my creations better, I started learning Cinema 4D to render my builds, and later experimented with terrain tools like Gaea.

Over time, I gained recognition within the Minecraft community, participated in an interview with the game’s developer, and helped manage a large community with hundreds of thousands of users. Through these experiences and the inspiring people around me, my perspective expanded naturally, leading me to move beyond voxel-based creation and fully dive into the world of 3D environment art.

Career & Recognition

Your work was ranked 4th at the Substance 3D Designer Insanity Awards 2025. What was the main goal of this project, and which aspects did you want to push the most?

The goal of this project was to create a convincing large-scale terrain using only a single material and heightmap-driven meshes, without relying on additional assets such as trees or rocks. The intention was to achieve a sense of believable mountains and forests when viewed from very long distances.

Even though it cannot fully match specialized terrain software, I focused on capturing the essence of erosion patterns, sediment flow, and surface transitions. Steeper slopes were shaped with sharper erosion lines, while lower areas gradually softened due to sediment accumulation.

I also attempted to reflect natural altitude-based vegetation patterns, increasing conifer-like shapes at higher elevations and broader forms at lower altitudes to create a more organic and believable landscape.

Artistic Approach & Workflow

How do you usually approach an environment project from start to finish? Can you describe the main steps of your workflow, from the initial blockout to the final render?

I think I basically follow a similar workflow as everyone else. Some differences are:

In the early blockout phase, I rely heavily on mannequin placement to establish scale, but for extremely large scenes, this alone can become insufficient. In those cases, I also create and apply properly scaled early-stage textures to blockout meshes, allowing me to validate scale and density from a distance.

In the mid-production stage, once the main assets are assembled in the engine, I intentionally avoid locking down lighting and composition too early. My belief is that a strong environment with solid structure and material definition should look appealing across multiple lighting conditions and camera angles. This flexible approach often leads to unexpected but powerful compositions and helps keep the scene visually resilient.

In the final rendering stage, I combine Unreal Engine’s Movie Render Queue with both default rendering and path tracing, followed by final color grading and adjustments in DaVinci Resolve.

Materials & Substance Designer

Materials play a key role in your work. How do you use Substance 3D Designer in your pipeline, and at what stage do materials become a central element of your environments?

As mentioned earlier, I actually start using Substance Designer surprisingly early in the production process, mainly to validate scale and density.

Even during the blockout and dummy stages, I actively build trim sheets and tiling textures, designing assets with reusability in mind while minimizing individual baking workflows as much as possible. This allows me to establish a flexible and efficient material-driven pipeline from the very beginning.

With recent technologies such as Nanite tessellation, I can now skip a significant portion of traditional modeling work and achieve tens of millions of polygons’ worth of detail using relatively simple base geometry. Iteration also becomes incredibly fast and forgiving, which further shifts the production focus toward material authoring rather than geometry alone.

Because of this, it is difficult to pinpoint a single moment when materials become the central element, they continuously influence almost every stage of the environment creation process.

UV Mapping & RizomUV

You are using RizomUV for UV unwrapping. What are the main reasons you chose RizomUV, and how does it fit into your production workflow?

For me, the main strengths of RizomUV are stability, speed, and reliable results.

In 3ds Max, even slightly complex geometry, such as chamfered edges or imperfect cylinders, often fails to unwrap cleanly, which can become a serious limitation when working with trim sheets. RizomUV handles these cases much more consistently, allowing me to focus on asset design instead of manual UV fixes.

Another major advantage is performance. Unwrapping dense or complex meshes in Max can easily lead to slowdowns or crashes, while RizomUV remains fast and stable, which makes it well suited for iterative workflows. Overall, it integrates naturally into my pipeline as a dedicated UV tool that removes friction and speeds up production.

Advice & Learning

Are there any fundamentals you think are often underestimated by younger artists?

One fundamental I think is often underestimated is basic technical understanding beyond simply using tools.

Modern engines and software allow artists to achieve great results very quickly, which is a huge advantage. At the same time, having some knowledge of shaders, rendering principles, and engine features can give artists more control and flexibility in shaping their visuals.

You don’t need deep programming skills, but even a moderate technical foundation can help with problem-solving, iteration, and creative freedom. Especially while building a portfolio, I think it is valuable to experiment boldly, push visual quality, and explore technical ideas, as this phase offers the best opportunity for learning and growth.

After getting a job, there is not much time to study…!

Looking Ahead

What are you currently working on, or what kind of projects would you like to explore next?

I would like to further explore procedural workflows and advanced material systems to create environments that feel both technically efficient and visually immersive. My long-term goal is to build large, believable worlds that leave a strong and lasting impression on players.