Swirly Forest
Large scale environment project done in Unreal Engine 5, and an additional smaller environment done in Unity for VRChat.
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The Unreal project involved a lot of research since I wanted to make everything from scratch, including the landscape and skybox materials. I checked out Gaea and World Machine for terrain creation (in the end I chose to use Gaea). I also learned about Speedtree, Quixel Megascans, and more about Unreal materials/workflow.
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Unity version involved a lot of optimization so it can run well in VRChat. While each foliage asset in Unreal had its own material with a 2048 texture, I put everything together into one material with everything atlas'd into one 1024 texture. I also brought over the LOD1 meshes to use as the LOD0 instead for lower polycount. The terrain is a lot smaller and I added heavy fog so distant foliage can be culled unnoticeably.
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Programs/Resources used:
Gaea: Terrain
Speedtree: Foliage
Quixel Megascans: Cliff and rock models, textures for foliage
Photoshop: Editing quixel textures
Blender: For making any tweaks on the models
Spacescape: Nebula and star textures for the skybox
Flowmap Painter: For creating the flowmap for the aura in the skybox
Unreal Engine 5: Engine for the large scale scene. Movie Render Queue was used for rendering images.
Unity: Engine for the small scale scene.
Trees and foliage used for the scene
Trees and foliage created in Speedtree. These include LODs and billboards, with modified Megascans textures.
Terrain and masks created in Gaea
Custom material made for the cliffs
RVT for rocks
Custom skybox material
Alternate version made in Unity for VRChat
This version is a smaller scene with heavy optimizations such as having every foliage textures as one texture image and lower polycount