FMP (Week 10 & 11) - Foliage and things

So I've done it again and crammed two weeks together - sorry! I've had a pretty stressful few weeks as my engine file kept insisting on crashing and refusing to save, so I spent a long time trying to figure out the cause, including re-doing lots of my shaders to try and improve the levels performance.

One of the first things I did over the two weeks was to create some grass.

I ended up making two variants as I wasn't entirely happy with the way that the grass came out originally. I experimented using speedtree to make nice placements of the grass and speed up the process in comparison to 3Ds Max, this also let me set up the wind easily.

Along with the grass, I also made some changes to foliage and created a few more assets. I created some textures for my trees to replace the original place holder photo textures, and also made some bushes and snow clumps.

The next thing big thing I did was to set up my water shader. This is the first time I have created a water shader, so as of now it isn't quite how I'd like it to be, I would like it to be translucent instead of reflective, so this is something I am going to need to work on in the future, but for now it is better than the default unreal water shader.

Below is a preview of the water in the scene.

A next major task was to create mountains for around the outside of the map to make it feel more immersive. I had originally had some but they were a little bit too sharp and I had deleted them a few weeks ago, but I went back to World Machine to create some more appropriate mountains that weren't quite as pointy.

Here's the mountains outside of my scene in engine, imported from world machine.

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Obligatory progress pictures to show how the level is coming on and for comparison purposes.