Forest Walk - Unreal Engine 4/5

Final Product

This product contains two high quality scenes using a large numbers of photogrammetry assets such as rocks, cliffs, a variety of photometric captured foliage ranging from large bushes and shrubs to grass and moss. This pack should contains everything you need to make a highly detailed environment set in the Scotland Highlands.

The pack contains a wide range of procedural content scattered throughout to deliver a realistic depiction of a natural environment.

All assets custom LOD to ensure performance is in check but still keep the visual silhouette of the assets. Most assets have had their texture resolution lowered to ensure they fit within the default streaming pool in Unreal.

This project DOES NOT contain or use Pivot Painter however a custom technique was used. Wind can be controlled globally via the Material Parameter Collection or by enabling a switch in each material instance for more per actor control.

Landscape shader is optimized well despite using a minimum of 7 & maximum of 9 material to paint on the terrain. The landscape version in the 2k level uses tesselation to enhance the blending and visual quality however this does come at a performance cost. I recommended turning this off if you have frame rate issues.

A huge range of content is scattered using the procedural foliage volumes. Use these to alter the placement and scattering settings, change the seed values, however keep in mind the more foliage you add the higher the performance cost. The procedural content has been set using custom end cull values to stop rendering & limit the performance cost. Change these values to what you feel looks right.

The function called Snow Overlay allows global snow coverage across the terrain & all assets to give it a winter feel. If you do not require this, remove the function from the required materials for an extra performance boost. All controls are globally access from the material parameter collection.

Note 1: Please ensure you use the Custom .ini file HERE to make sure all visual and & performance is at its peak for this project. This of course will vary based on the hardware you have. This is because the this product is counted as an Asset pack which you can add from the Unreal Launcher.

Note 2: The project does have enabled Extend default luminance range in Auto Exposure in the project settings, however lighting values have been kept low to ensure you can still preview the scene outside of any cinematic cameras.

Note 3: The pack contains a CC0 HDR image taken from HDRI Haven which they allow me to use their skyboxes for commercial usage. Read more about it HERE

Note 4: Naturally given the type of pack featuring real-time lighting its HIGHLY ADVISED to ALWAYS use a Movable directional sunlight and not bake any shadows. If you do choose to bake lighting you should be using the Volumetric Lightmaps

Performance Numbers using AMD 3900X, GTX 3080, 64GB RAM:

Deep Forest Scene - 72fps, 13.8ms at 2100x900 (Dynamic Lighting)

Main Level Scene - 55fps, 19ms at 2100x900 (Dynamic Lighting + Terrain Tesselation)

Engine Conversion: To convert the product to use in Unreal Engine 5, locate .uproject, right click and change engine version to Unreal Engine 5.

Technical Details

• Two unique levels with complete photoscanned content using procedural scattering.
• 74 Unique ground cover meshes ranging from large ferns to micro moss clumps.
• 24 Shrubs & bushes of various sizes and unique details.
• 22 Cliff Meshes ( Large to micro detail ) , 16 Boulders (With custom foliage scattered on top)
• 15 Unique Douglas Fir trees ( With Billboards ), 4 Saplings, 17 Stumps (With custom foliage scattered on top)
• Landscape material featuring 9 materials to paint with detail texture to enhance fidelity.
• Global Z-Up Moss for all mesh content in the scene.
• Baseline material function to easily tweak simple values in each material instance.
• Fuzzy Shading across all assets to enhance visual fidelity & ground assets into the world.
• Detail maps to enhance the texture resolution of all rocks meshes.
• Custom animated skybox using flowmaps to push the authentic feel of the world.
• Number of Unique Meshes: 208
• Collision: Yes (Auto Generated per specific mesh type)
• LODs: Yes (Up to 7 LODs + Billboards on Trees)
• Number of Materials and Material Instances: 16 Master Materials, 109 Material Instances
• Number of Textures: 320
• Texture Resolutions: Up to 4k