Open World Conifer Forest Landscape in Unreal 5

It’s really been off to the races since getting this new machine.

I wanted to take the leap from creating limited small scale environments to truly opening up into seamless open worlds to explore with the assets I’ve made. The first step was applying a LOD and collision pass to every asset which took a little time but was worth it. After that I did a little delving into Unreal’s PCG but I found I still like to use the older foliage system to lay down brush strokes of assets by hand. However I really love the spline workflow’s PCG has for things like shorelines. 🙂

One last challenge was creating some form of foliage interaction. I ended up settling for a simple mesh distance field offset using a reverse bell shape placed around the character. It definitely isn’t anything fancy and has some jankiness to it but it can be easily applied to thousands of instances without much fuss.

Lastly I’m venturing into some very simple scripting trigger boxes for some of the ambient wildlife around the world. Very excited to see where things like this can go, knowing I can drop into this map and just stroll through it for a long session is filling me with a lot of excitement on how I can take it further to make it more engaging and immersive. 😀