Robert Berg, Environment Artist at Embark Studios, has shared his latest personal project — a procedural 1x1km forest.
The artist’s goal here was to try out some of the Unreal’s features: the Foliage Volumes, PoM, Contact Shadows and the new SSGI from v4.23.
The artist placed 100% of the assets using either the Procedural Foliage Volumes or Grass Layers. Berg used volumes to place all the larger assets, “even the rocks, and anything small enough not to require collision was placed using landscape Grass Layers.”
The goal here was to see if I could make a believable scene/world without placing anything manually. “I also.. may have exaggerated the GI quite a bit, because GI is cool! That is all.”
All the assets and textures were scanned by the artist in a forest close to where he lives and modeled in Blender 2.8. Berg thought it had a pretty unique look, so he wanted to capture the look and make it bigger.
You can learn more about the project here.