Creating Realistic UE5 Environment With Native Features

Introduction

Hi everyone, let me introduce myself. I'm Alexandre Martin, a 3D Artist and Instructor on software like 3ds Max, Substance 3D Painter, and Unreal Engine (Unreal Academic Partner).

I have been passionate about 3D for many years and became especially passionate about real-time and realism for environments using Unreal Engine: we can do incredible things today! I have an atypical background since I studied law and then joined the French Air and Space Force Academy. Still, passionate about computer science, particularly 3D, for which I am self-taught, today, I work on a wide variety of projects and share my knowledge with my students from l'EDAIC and E-Artsup school in Lyon, France.

The project I am going to present to you is an Unreal Engine 5 learning exercise that I did with my students. The goal was to create a realistic environment with as little complexity as possible using the software's native features.

References

Here are some references I used, it's a very nice place in the center of France in Auvergne:

Procedural Terrain Workflow

First of all, I used a very simple height map found on the Internet in 2048x2048. I made field equipment with only 2 Quixel Megascans, one more rocky and the other more vegetal, for a coherent mix.

So, I used the Landscape Layer Blend function to mix the 2 materials using only the color base and the normal map. As for the roughness map, I left it with a constant of 1 so that there would be no shine on the ground. Then, I generated the landscape to allow us to paint it at will.

Then I created the vegetation using the Landscape Grass Output node, which allows you to retrieve the node, Layer Blend, and assign it a value of 1 if you want to see the vegetation appear, or 0 to make it disappear, and if you paint this or that material, the vegetation grows or not. It's very practical and very simple as a technique I think.

After this, I chose a pack that I had obtained for free and Megascans that we stored in a container that we got using the Foliage Grass Type function. Then the vegetation grows automatically (this is what we call procedural) it's almost magical!

Setting Up Water

I placed the river in the valley using the water plug-in from Unreal Engine; by default, the water and lighting are overexposed. That's why I added an HDRI into the scene using HDRIBackdrop and a post-process volume to make some adjustments.

For the post-process, the first step was to set the exposure that I put in manually. Also, the Local Exposure system of the post-process allows to make precise adjustments.

Then, I focused on the color of the water by changing the simple color settings of the water material here.

Then, I set the Exponential Height Fog that I activated in volumetric:

I added rocks on the banks of the river and some bushes, painted the bottom of the river with a material that did not integrate vegetation, and also activated Lumen in the post process with these settings:

The final result allows us to make nice screenshots and movies with the Sequencer and some retouching. That's exactly the goal here: to teach my students simple techniques that allow them to achieve impressive results quickly.