Autumn Woods

I aimed to showcase my foliage creation skills and highlight Nanite in UE5 with this scene, running smoothly at 1440p 30fps on a 3070 with Lumen RT enabled. While I've created forest scenes in the past, I wanted to push further and create something substantial. This scene, which I'm proud of, features a distinct autumn color palette and a warm, inviting tone in its composition.

I focused on achieving correct exposure and lighting values, utilizing an HDRI for the sky, directional light for the sun, and volumetric fog. Doing it this way and having physically accurate exposure settings on the camera and then grading the image in a post process volume achieved the desired result.

A key goal was density in the forest, achieved through Nanite on all meshes. I modeled individual foliage components to avoid opacity maps, allowing for higher mesh density and detailed leaves and bark. While I utilized World Position Offset (WPO), I minimized its performance impact by limiting its use to closer distances from the camera.

For shadows on ground cover, virtualized shadows proved less performant, so I opted for contact shadows, maintaining simillar visual quality while optimizing performance. RT shadows couldn't be enabled as the performance cost on my system was far too high moreover, without the correct CVAR it would break with the nanite geometry.

I altered Megascans assets as well as, creating my own custom assets inside the relevent software to create my foliage and the focus point of the scene, the cabin. I wanted to have a centre piece in my scene which is why i decided on incorporating a cabin in the scene as the man made element contrasted nicely with the natural surrounding. I also leveraged Nanite landscapes as they are really good at adding lots of displacement detail on the ground with little to no cost to performance, I saw an increase in performance with nanite landscapes enabled.

To populate my Forrest quickly and effeciently and to allow for quick itterations I made a PCG graph to generate my forrest. There is a youtube video showcasing this.