Peak Talk is a YouTube interview series produced for Paramount's streaming platform, featuring celebrity guests in conversation against a stunning alpine backdrop. As the lead Unreal Engine artist for this virtual production, I designed and built an immersive snowy mountain environment that served as the show's signature setting. The environment featured snow-covered peaks, dense pine forests, and ski resort infrastructure, including functional ski lifts and gondolas. To efficiently populate the mountain landscape, I developed custom Procedural Content Generation (PCG) tools in Unreal Engine 5 that scattered thousands of pine trees across the terrain, while respecting slope angles and elevation zones to ensure natural-looking forest distribution. This procedural approach reduced manual placement time from weeks to hours while maintaining art-directed control over composition. These PCG systems also handled placement of ski lift towers along designated routes, ensuring consistent spacing and terrain-following alignment. Working alongside technical artist Nicholas Kim, we populated and animated hundreds of gondolas traveling along the procedurally generated cable systems, adding dynamic movement throughout the scene. The real-time environment was optimized for live virtual production on Paramount's LED volume stage, achieving high performance that enabled dynamic camera movement and real-time relighting to match each episode's creative direction. This project showcased my ability to combine technical pipeline development with artistic environmental design, delivering a production-ready asset that balanced visual fidelity with the performance demands of live virtual production.

Below are links to each of the episodes on YouTube, as well as some in engine screenshots of the snowy mountain environment I created for Peak Talk.