My first experience with game engines was in CryEngine 3. When I opened my very first scene, I was greeted by an endless ocean stretching out in every direction — a moment that, to my younger self, felt full of limitless potential and creativity.

I wanted to recreate that feeling in Unreal Engine by building an ocean material from scratch and learning the underlying techniques along the way. I implemented overlapping Gerstner wave functions to form the rolling water surface, and applied normal corrections on the tessellated mesh to achieve accurate lighting response.

Building and lighting the scene was genuinely enjoyable, and I’m proud of how it turned out. It captures the sense of scale and possibility that first inspired me