Adding Foliage

We are going to start adding some foliage to our jungle scene. So far our scene has looked anything, but the jungle. Well now it is time to get that feel. Let’s first head over to the Unreal marketplace to download some forestry. We’re going to download from the free assets the Landscape Pro 2.0 auto generated pack and add to our project. We are then going to go back into quixel and download some 3D plants from there. For this scene we are going to download from the fern> beech fern and from the ground cover> wood sorrel. We will download them and add them to our scene.

Select Foliage Mode and begin adding the foliage by dragging it into our foliage location. Then select all of the ferns to make it the active foliage.

Then you will like the landscape sculpting bring in a paint brush and paint your foliage onto the scene. Here is a before and after.

Now this will not cover enough for us so we will have to go into the details panel and edit it for our needs. So let’s undo what we just placed down for now.

In the details panel let’s increase the scale from 1.0 to 3.0min-7.0 max. Our ferns might be a little large, but we are going to go with it for now, but our ferns themselves might be too bright for our scene. So we are going to adjust our material instance to a darker color.

We are going to do as we have before and go into the color overlay and select a darker green.

Now we are going to repeat the process for our sorrel. We are going to to with a scale of 2–4 for our sizes. We also are going to adjust the material instance colors here. We don’t want the colors to be too close, but not too far apart where it looks weird.

Now if we want to reduce the amount of foliage we currently have we can select the erase tool. To erase all of it have the density set to 0, but if you want to just decrease the population without deleting everything just raise your density level. This only effects meshes that have been selected.

So let’s clear our all of our foliage meshes from our scene and start fresh. We are going now select all of our meshes and try to find the perfect density for painting our meshes. Begin painting along the edges so we can define a path for our player to move through our level.

We really want to work bigger to smaller so let’s get our trees added to the scene.

Select one of the pines (make sure it is the static mesh and not the foliage static mesh) we downloaded and drag into our foliage. Then go into the details panel and make sure collisions are turned on for our trees, by selecting block all collisions.

Now are tree is very large and our scene is not that big so we want to place them one at a time using the single option to just place trees. In nature trees will try to grow straight up and down so check and see if align to normal is on or not. If it is, it is best to uncheck it for now. We also are going to use the scale of 1.3–2.3 for now the tree sizes.

Now drag all of our trees we are going to be using. While staying in single instance we can cycle through all of our selected trees.

Next we are going to be adjusting our lighting fixing any remaining issues and adding some post-processing to our scene.