UE4 Highlands Landscape Auto-material Demonstration

A short video of some of the key features of a Scottish Highland's inspired landscape auto-material I created.

Excluding the foliage and the water plane, everything on the landscape is powered by a single material which includes a mix of dynamic landscape masking and a few image masks that came with the heightmap. It's not totally procedural, but nothing is hand-placed or crafted so it would be easy to edit.

All the ground foliage is placed using the material and it conforms to it appropriate mini-biome.

The material is computationally expensive, but it covers a huge area really convincingly. If there wasn't a lot else going on, it could be ok as a basic for narrative-based real-time project. It runs at 60fps at 1080p using an RTX2080 and looks great in HDR.

The point of this challenge was to see how far I could take a (mostly) autonomous material for ease of working with convincing large open environments. Everything at medium scale looks fine and meets my expectations. Close up, it starts to fall apart because I wasn't able to get displacement on the rock and pebble materials. It was just too expensive. The world view looks fine, just lacks any real interest and it totally loses the shadowing which destroys the realism somewhat.

All materials and ground cover foliage were created using Quixel's excellent Megascans library - except the heather which I borrowed from Epic's Kite Demo.

I created the trees in 3DS Max and used Megascans assets to create their materials. They are quite heavy in terms of polygon count so I will work on this.