Viking Forest - Unreal Engine 4

This is a personal project I've been working on for a few weeks.

FOLIAGE:
All the trees are created in SpeedTree, using photogrammetry bases and textures. I created the branches using a single leaf texture and generated a leaf cluster which was then baked in SpeedTree to PBR textures. I used megascans for most of the smaller ground coverage and created the subsurface textures in Photoshop to match. I also used megascans to add some background assets like the rock/bolder and the pile of branches. The terrain uses camera distance based tessellation to give some close up definition.

VFX:
For the river I created a spline blueprint tool for positioning and a shader that registers mesh distance fields to add a more dynamic flow effect. I created firefly and falling leaf particles to add more movement for the showreel!

PROPS:
I sculpted the axe, arrow, tree stump and shield using Zbrush before baking and texturing them in Substance Painter. I created a channel-packed mask texture for the shield and put together a shader that let's me fully customize the colours and patterns within UE4.

OPTIMIZATION:
For optimization, all textures are 1024x1024 or lower resolution and any using transparency are set to Masked excluding the water. I channel packed Metallic, Roughness and AO into one texture, replacing Metallic with Subsurface for foliage. All assets above 1k tris use LODs that gradually lower the topology to 1k or less, the trees use billboard meshes after a certain distance too.