Setting Up Vegetation in UE4

Giorgi Chitidze shared some tips on the production of awesome scenes in Unreal, with Speedtree and Megascans.

Giorgi Chitidze shared some tips on the production of awesome scenes in Unreal, with Speedtree and Megascans.

Introduction

Hello, My name is Giorgi and I’m from Georgia. It’s a small country, so learning anything about 3D or other IT stuff is pretty difficult, I studied 3D by myself. I’ve also participated in game jams, so I started to learn gamedev. Now I’m studying at a international IT Step Academy and also working on a project and I’m pretty excited to show it to the world.

Project

My main goal in this project was to create something really good, but response about this was astonishing. Also, I can say that this is a demo level of my upcoming project, so I was testing skills.

All I can say about SpeedTree and Megascans is that these software products are immersive and easy-to-use and also allow to achieve a really good-looking levels, but the idea of using these software solutions together is that I wanted to create a forest scene for a game and so I wanted the variations of assets to create something organic and so SpeedTree and Megascans are the keys here, because they give unlimited variations of organic assets.

With Megascans and Unreal Engine 4 I used default values, but it was mainly about materials, because well designed materials with good lightning are giving impressive visuals. The assets I’ve used here are from Megascans subscription and also from a free library.

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Materials

Materials here are, of course, PBR. I’ve used Tesselation, Sub Surface Scattering and Parallax occlusion together to achieve this level of detail. Using them together is good, but also pretty expensive for PC to render.

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Lighting

Lightning here is fully dynamic because I’m tired of building it statically, but as I’ve said before it’s expensive as well. The key here is Unreal Engine 4, because its volumetric lightning is immersive, giving really good looking lightning here. But when we are talking about lightning inside the engine or any other rendering software, we need to know the time of the day. We need to define the atmosphere and decided whether we should choose a stylized approach.

The biggest challenge here was the idea of environment, assets and, of course, lightning, because setting up good lightning is very difficult. When working on this small environment I’ve learned a lot about creating right assets, using them together and also achieving a good-looking lightning.

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Giorgi Chitidze, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

Join discussion

Comments 4

  • Giorgi Chitidze

    #Jim Da Tornes thank you for positive comment but this is not a tutorial.

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    Giorgi Chitidze

    ·6 years ago·
  • Anonymous user

    For an article titled "Setting up vegetation in UE4", this has surprisingly little to do with setting up vegetation.

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    Anonymous user

    ·6 years ago·
  • jim DaTornes

    nothing to learn from this article. a masked material for leaves is most standard, then an unreadable ground material, some basic post-process volume settings which fit just his idea are not helpfull at all. nothing about the high-end assets that cost performance like hell and make it unusable for game or real-time applications. yes everyone can make nice looking renders with good assets, but you dont need UE4 for this, this can be done with any 3d program.

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    jim DaTornes

    ·6 years ago·
  • Chris Styles

    Sorry, but this article is so high level it's very unfair to say it shares tips on production of a scene. A topic of this breadth and depth deserves in-depth tutorials not a few screen grabs with captions. If you guys need writers for environment design topics feel free to contact me because I'm super passionate about it and happy to grow my skills to share more with others.

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    Chris Styles

    ·6 years ago·

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