Unreal Engine – Nordic Conifer Biome v4.26-4.27

Author

Dim d

Created

July 27, 2024July 31, 2024

Updated

July 31, 2024July 27, 2024

Comments

Categories: Environments, Unreal Engine Assets

This pack contains everything needed to recreate a realistic mossy conifer forest for your game or scene!

Everything has been carefully and thoughtfully crafted and optimized to run on currently gen hardware.

Every mesh is lodded and set up with custom LOD distances and Shader LODs where needed to reduce rendering cost at a distance.

Most asset come with 4k textures, but have been scaled down in engine to reasonable “game” sizes so that it fits within Unreal’s default StreamingPool. Of course without sacrificing any noticeable visual fidelity.

All trees and large vegetation have been set up with billboards for maximum performance and visuals, as well as Pivot Painter Wind for realistic movement.

Wind strength can be controlled globally through a single parameter in the Parameter Collection named MPC_Weather, to go from a light breeze to full on storm.

Also within the MPC_Weather is a global snow parameter which will add a light coating of snow to the scene.

Landscape shader is optimized and set up with 5 materials, one of them being a Path Material, intended to create gameplay paths, and no procedural spawning will happen on the Path material, which makes creating visual guidance easy.

The Landscape Shader comes in two version, one with Tessellation/Displacement enabled and one without.

A word of warning, tessellation in Unreal is very expensive, and it is also no longer officially supported by Epic, and will not be available in future version of Unreal, so I would not recommend using it.

But if don’t mind trading some performance for a little visual boost, I have included it none the less.

Also included in the Pack is the example map from the screen shots, it is a 2x2km procedurally spawned forest, complete with backdrop.

Within the map, in addition to the regular conifer forest, you will find small sub-biomes such as swamps, grassy meadows and lakes.

It is hard to convey the sheer scale of the map in just screenshots and video, so I recommend everyone to fire it up in an FPS Template project and go exploring!

Features:

28 Unique trees and stumps of various species, ranging from sizes XS to XL.
25 Unique Cliffs and Rocks and Logs
Undergrowth and Scatter meshes to cover the forest floor.
Simple and optimized Landscape shader, both with and without Tessellation/Displacement
Simple to use Global Wind and Snow controls
Optimized vegetation and asset parent shaders with LASTLOD function to easily create cheaper shaders for distant LODs
Billboards for all trees