Update 1.2 : Imposters now work correctly with UE5.
UPDATE 1.1 : Content Update
Trees now have Octahedral Imposters(Billboards) set up.
This bumps the required engine version to 4.26, previous version is still available to 4.25 users.
UPDATE: By popular demand, here is a video running around in the provided scene using the Unreal FPS template.
The resolution is 1920x1080 and its running on a regular Gefore 1080 graphics card:
This contains the full Unreal Engine 4.25.4 project for a procedural forest scene, along with all models, textures, shaders, project settings, lighting and the map containing the procedural rules.
So why should you get it?
It's great if you want to dissect my work, see how I set up and organize my shaders and build content to be optimized for dense usage. See how I light my scene and configure the project settings for something like this.
Or if you are just looking to get your hands on some AAA-level models and textures, optimized and ready to go for console usage right away!
Within the provided map you will find Procedural Foliage Volumes with accompanying rules, so you can easily see how I went about setting it all up, to create a complete forest scene without placing a single asset manually.
To go along with the asset you will find some smart shader solutions for wetness around the shoreline, cheap dynamic application of snow cover and a water shader with automatic debris gathering around intersecting meshes and shorelines.
And lets not forget what is possibly the star of the show, a cheap way to set up pixel perfect height map based shadows on every mesh, using PixelDepthOffset and Contact Shadows in an unholy alliance!
Here is the original video of the environment:
Technical Details:
Features:
- A complete scene and project containing a procedurally placed forest, using Procedural Foliage Volumes.
- Optimized Parent Shaders for Nature and Vegetation assets, containing feature switches for different types of assets.
- AAA-level, optimized rocks and vegetation.
- The sweetest moss you've ever seen
- Water Shader
- 5 different landscape materials
- Dynamic Snow
Number of Unique Meshes:
4x Trees ranging from sized Small to Large
3x Large Rocks
5x Medium Rocks
1x Small Rock
3x Tree Logs
1x Small Tree Stump
7x Ground Scatter Meshes (Leaves, twigs, vines)
1x Water Reeds
Collision: Yes, all collision is auto generated using Unreal.
Vertex Count: 199-5570
LODs: Assets have LODs auto generated by Unreal, for some of the vegetation, custom lods have been created.
Number of Materials and Material Instances:
5 Parent Materials
28 Material Instances
Number of Textures: 98
Texture Resolutions: 1024x1024 - 2048x2048
The Snow parameter is located under MaterialLibrary/MaterialParameterCollections/MPC_Snow
NOTE: Procedural Foliage is an Editor Preference and not a Project setting. So in order to access and place new Foliage volumes and access the extended settings, you need to go into your Editor Preferences and activate Procedural Foliage.
NOTE2: In order to get the correct lighting if importing into another project, make sure you have the following under RendererSettings in DefaultEngine.ini
r.AllowStaticLighting=False
r.GenerateMeshDistanceFields=True
r.SSGI.Enable=True
r.SupportSkyAtmosphereAffectsHeightFog=True
