I am Yahiya. I build interactive worlds, mostly for architecture, and I've been chasing that since before I knew it was a job.

// ALEPPO. WHERE IT STARTED.

The first time I disappeared into a screen I was six, losing a top-down racing game over and over until I won, and it was my parents clapping that pulled me back to earth. That game taught me two things I still run on: you can disappear into a world, and you fail at something until you don't. A few years later, The Sims became my favorite game, and it taught me the third thing, I wasn't really building houses, I was watching how people moved through a space and reacted to it. Years later, that became the entire point of my work.

I chased that feeling everywhere, pulling apart every game mod and tech demo I could find. Then one day, sitting with my cousin, we stumbled onto a set of architectural walkthroughs, I think they were in Chinese or Korean, I never knew exactly, and I just stared. Complete awe. That was the moment I knew I wanted to build that even more than I wanted to make games. Maybe it was in the blood; both my grandparents were architects.

So I started learning 3D with whatever I could get, Xara 3D first, then a copy of 3ds Max from back when the box still said Discreet, before Autodesk. I found my way into online forums, and those led me to start running weekly community meetups in Aleppo, a handful of us trading CDs of tutorials and teaching each other what we'd figured out. I loved those meetups. Alongside the 3D, I picked up photography and a bit of graphic design.

// 2011. THE LONG WAY AROUND.

I was never accepted into university, which felt like a loss at the time and turned out to be the opposite. A few months before the war started, I left Syria for Algeria to try studying again. Instead I ended up working, starting in a potato chip factory, where I saved up and bought my first real laptop. From there, a textile job paid the days while I taught myself 3D at night, every night. I learned After Effects from Video Copilot, 3ds Max from Arrimus 3D, and VFX from Allan McKay, people who put everything online for anyone willing to do the work. Eventually the practice turned into a paycheck: my first real job as a motion graphics artist at a TV company. That led to VFX, then six months doing effects for film, and from there, out on my own as a freelancer.

// IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING, SET IT FREE.

For years the tools that could do what I really wanted were locked behind a subscription I couldn't afford. Then in 2014, Unreal Engine became free. Epic put it out under a line I've never forgotten, if you love something, set it free, and I did love it. That single decision rerouted my career. I'm grateful the engine went free, but just as grateful for the community around it, the people making lessons and answering my questions on the forums at all hours.

The first thing I built in it was just a test, a project to learn on. But walking through an apartment in first person, changing the materials and lights and finishes live, was nothing like looking at a render of it. It lit me up. I didn't think of it as a strategy or a bet, I just knew, immediately, that I wanted this to be the job. That little test project found its way around the internet, shared by Epic and NVIDIA, and it taught me the lesson that still runs everything I do: show the work, and the right people come find you.

// 2015. ISTANBUL.

In 2015 I moved to Istanbul, a better base for working online, and I've been here ever since. The food doesn't hurt either, I'm genuinely in love with it. I kept taking on clients and kept pushing past architecture into whatever was interesting, my first VR project in 2018, then automotive, aerospace, virtual production, game environments, R&D. The subject kept changing and the underlying skill didn't, which is how I learned that real-time 3D might be one of the most transferable things a person can know.

// 2020. SHARING WHAT I KNOW.

When COVID hit, hands-on and VR work stalled, and I knew it would for a while, so I leaned into something I'd quietly wanted to do for years. I'd tried making educational videos back in 2015 and let the impostor feeling talk me out of it. This time I stayed with it, and it turned out to be one of the things I love most. Part of it was a debt, I owed the community that taught me. The rest was simpler: teaching is the same instinct as setting the engine free, knowledge is better when it's accessible. And it brought back more than I expected, sharing what I knew quietly turned into more clients than I ever imagined, a happy accident I didn't see coming. Watching someone use these tools to change their own work, the way I'd changed mine, never gets old.

That stretch is also when the recognition came. Epic made me a Golden Instructor Partner in 2021. The next year, an Epic MegaGrant funded a run of new Unreal tutorials. And in 2024, Cesium backed a series teaching real-time 3D and geospatial for AEC, putting whole cities, accurately placed on the planet, inside the engine.

// 2026. STILL A STUDENT.

A decade in, and the part that still gets me out of bed is the same as when I was six: learning something I can't do yet. The honest center of my work has never been the final render, it's the figuring-out. The tools, the plugins, the pipelines. Lately that's pulled me deep into development, I spent late 2024 and all of 2025 in visual scripting and programming, and with AI making it possible to learn almost anything fast, I feel like a beginner again in the best way.

I'm still very much building projects, that hasn't changed. What's changed is what they are: less about the picture, more about interactivity. The ability to walk through data and understand a place or a decision before it exists in the world. Digital twins, interactive experiences, that's the frontier I want to keep building toward.

This site is everything around that: the engineering, the running, the reading, and whatever I happen to be working out at the time.