Teldrassil Remake

This project began a long time ago. What started as an unattainable fantasy to reimagine a small part of World of Warcraft under my own style and direction slowly became reality.

While this post focuses on the natural side of the project — the vegetation, textures, landscape, and technical work — it’s only a small part of a much larger world. The full city (or partial, at this point) of Darnassus is also part of this effort, though it’s still in progress.

World of Warcraft shaped who I am as an artist and inspired me to pursue game development. This particular place always filled me with awe when I was younger, and recreating it felt like the best way to honor that feeling — through art.

The project has existed in some form for several years, though much of that time was spent refining ideas, learning new techniques, and letting it rest between phases. I only had small windows of time during the week to work on it, so progress came slowly but steadily. Along the way, I revisited and rebuilt certain parts as my skills — and Unreal Engine itself — evolved.

In many ways, it became a personal R&D playground: a space to experiment with workflows, shaders, vegetation systems, and other techniques that later carried over into my professional work. Much of what I learned here directly shaped how I approach tools and pipelines today.

From the beginning, I set one simple but difficult rule: start from a completely blank canvas. That meant an empty Unreal project — no pre-made assets or reused content from previous work (aside from a few plugins for clouds, weather, and VFX). Every rock, texture, and shader was created from scratch, with deliberate art direction and intent. I did this not just to learn, but to understand and control every part of the creative process.

Performance was something I cared about, mostly as a way to learn. My target was 60 FPS, but near the end I decided to push visuals as far as possible and let go of strict optimization. The project has lived through multiple engine generations, from UE4.27 to UE5.5 — bringing both challenges and growth.

It’s been a long, humbling, and rewarding journey; one that’s taught me as much about the craft as it has about patience, problem-solving, and perseverance. Posting it here feels like letting go of a huge weight — both sad and deeply satisfying.

Anyways, enjoy. I hope to expand on this later in the form of a blog post, or a video — we'll see!

P.S. I'd like to extend special thanks to Inu Games for the Pivot Painter 2 plugin which was amazing in adding wind to my SpeedTree files.
https://www.artstation.com/inugames