Unreal Engine – Leaf Tree Forest Biome

Videos:

CONTENT SHOWCASE

PERFORMANCE METRICS

 

This contains the full Unreal Engine 4.26 project for a densely populated, 1×1 km, procedurally placed forest scene, along with all models, textures, shaders, project settings, lighting.

 

I’ve taken taken great care to optimize every piece of the content to extremely high degrees. Content is tweaked to be able to run on “last gen” hardware (PS4/XBone)

 

Each asset has been set up with both Mesh and Shader LODs (reducing shader complexity even further at a distance).

 

I have taken the same care here with optimizing and polishing as I would if the content was for a shipping game , perhaps even pushing it just a little bit further even!

 

The provided example map and content has been tweaked and tweaked again to fit within what I consider to be reasonable “console specs”.

 

Rendering about 2,5 – 3 million tris per frame, and 600-800 draw calls, running in Standalone Mode.

 

All trees and large vegetation have been set up with billboards for maximum performance and visuals, as well as Pivot Painter Wind for realistic movement.

 

Landscape shader is super optimized and set up with 4 materials, the Path Material is intended to create gameplay paths, and no procedural spawning will happen on the Path material, which makes creating visual guidance easy.

 

NOTE: If you want to import this into an already existing project, simply copy the entire ProceduralForest2 folder into the Content folder of your project, please be aware tho that this will break the lighting on the example level, unless you match a few Project Settings, please see NOTE 3.

 

NOTE2: 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.

 

NOTE3: In order to get the correct lighting, visuals and performance 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

 

r.VirtualTextures=True

 

r.DBuffer=False

 

r.EarlyZPass=2

 

r.BasePassOutputsVelocity=True

 

r.BasePassForceOutputsVelocity 1

 

r.VolumetricFog.GridPixelSize 16

 

r.VolumetricFog.GridSize 64