The Gateways to Annihillation

Gateways to Annihilation | Environment Art

This personal project started with a simple question: what would it be like to step inside the world depicted on the cover of Gateways to Annihilation by Morbid Angel, originally illustrated by Dan Seagrave?

I wanted to take that abstract, dreamlike artwork and reinterpret it as a 3D environment, exploring its shapes, atmosphere, and hidden narrative through the perspective of a video game environment artist.

The visual direction draws inspiration from Baroque painting, artists such as Zdzisław Beksiński and H. R. Giger, and games like Returnal, Dark Souls, and Mortal Shell. These influences helped shape the environment's dark atmosphere, unusual structures, and sense of an ancient, unknown world.

On the technical side, the environment was built using modular assets, five sets of tileable materials, baked textures, two UV channels, RGB masks, and shader blending techniques to introduce material variations and additional surface details while keeping the workflow efficient and optimized for real-time rendering. The rain effects were implemented using William Faucher’s Easy Rain plugin for Unreal Engine, helping bring the scene to life and reinforce its dark, atmospheric mood.

The goal was to balance artistic exploration with the practical demands of game development, creating an environment that goes beyond recreating the original artwork and instead explores what this world could become when brought into an interactive space.

For me, this project is about the connection between music, visual art, and environment design — and how a single image can inspire an entire world to explore.