Task 2 – Foliage / Procedural Foliage – 1 of 2

Park Foliage

For my park, I had to spend some time really tweaking the values of my foliage for the grass.

Considerations:

• Efficiency / optimisation
• Density
• Realism; grass+flowers and amount per cluster

To save time manually painting these, shorter grass in a park would have a tendency to just be filled and less patchy. I opted to use the paint brush tool placed under the main foliage tool. This just meant selecting my grass, 2 flower variations, and fine tuning the details for primarily efficiency purposes. With this at an acceptable setting, I simply painted onto each 400×400 mesh floor which made up my park.

Below is a closer look showing sparse flowers mixed in with a very short grass, utilising UE4’s wind effect nodes within the material instance itself.

Procedural Landscape Foliage

I couldn’t simply afford to paintbrush foliage this dense onto my landscape, nor did I particularly want to manually place this on such a large 4096 landscape.

A method we were shown in session, which I had already had a brief look into, would be my next port of call:

Enabling this within the project settings -> ‘General – Experimental’ was the first thing I needed to do.

After some tweaking of the radius settings within the BP’s, I found a density setting I was happy with. These are also decimated in terms of quality as they’re essentially filler to add some form of depth to the landscaped areas.

If more of my landscape was accessible or navigable, then I’d probably paint this manually, as to my knowledge this can’t be dictated by landscape types as per my procedural landscape materials, so it doesn’t save me much time in that regard.

That said I didn’t particularly find it slow as it’s essentially just swiftly placing and duplicating blocking volumes. I found they can be mass built as per the procedural BP which was great.

Trees will require more refining as perSpeed Tree / TreeIt as soon as time constraints allow.