A stepwell is a building you descend into, where every level down is a landing with a different relationship to the light. It is, structurally, a level. I rebuilt one at survey accuracy in Unreal, mostly to find out whether the thing I keep telling junior artists is actually true.
The accurate version is beautiful and it does not read. Standing in it, you cannot tell how far down you are, because the real building repeats its motif at every level with only subtle variation, and the human eye in a real space picks up cues that a camera at 90 degrees of field of view does not.
The version that reads exaggerates the light falloff per level and varies the depth of the landings by about fifteen percent more than the original. It is architecturally wrong and it is legible from a screenshot, which is the test that matters for a space a player will navigate at speed.
This is the part I want junior environment artists to internalise: reference is not a target. The building solved a problem for a person standing in it with two eyes and a lifetime of depth cues. You are solving a different problem for a camera, and the two solutions are related but they are not the same solution.
