Week 9 - Wednesday: Tutorial Session

For this week's tutorial session I have been getting some help with adding foliage to my scene in Unreal Engine. Because I don't have the time to invest in creating my own trees, I was recommended to use some of the freely available assets on the Unreal Engine marketplace. I downloaded the Epic Games Open World Demo Collection (2015), which has given me access to a few tree assets as well as some grass. I have also been creating some custom vines that will be growing on the walls of the exterior.

 The vines I have created in 3DS Max.

I was introduced to the foliage brush within Unreal Engine and was shown how to apply lots of assets over a large surface area efficiently. I have begun painting the grass into my environment scene:

The exterior with the grass beginning to be painted in using the foliage brush.

One problem that I have noticed with using the foliage brush is that it treats all the objects that have been painted with it as one asset. Because there is so much grass in the scene the lightmap for this element is ridiculously huge. It was causing my light bake times to get very expensive so as a solution to this I have disabled shadow casting on the grass. This will make the grass look slightly less-realistic, however because there is so much of it in the scene the fact that each blade of grass isn't casting a shadow shouldn't be noticeable.

I am starting to place trees within the scene as well. I am hoping to create some nice long shadows across the environment to indicate the time of day and create some visual interest with the lighting, as currently it feels rather flat.

The asset pack I am using contains 4 types of tree, several rocks and smaller vegetation like grass. Each asset comes with its own materials.

EPIC GAMES (2015). Open World Demo Collection. [online] https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/open-world-demo-collection [Accessed 17/0/2018].

EPIC GAMES (2015). Open World Demo Collection. [Online Image]. Available at: https://cdn1.epicgames.com/ue/item/000_OverView-1920x1080-c3379c40227fa234cecd992feaade9b5.png [Accessed: 18/07/2018].