This is my Hobbit Shire Film set creation which I've made in my UE 5 environment creation in depth course (The course is made by me). I've tried to make the real film set where is located in New Zealand.

The tools are used

Unreal Engine 5.3.2, Substance( Designer, Painter, Sampler), 3DsMax, RizomUV, SpeedTree, Quadspinner Gaea, Blender, PhotoShop

Land scape creation

Since I wanted to make a real film set, I generated real height map data from satellite image. Then I used this height map in Gaea to create erosion and some masks for different ground textures. These masks were crucial to determine the places where you want to spawn the vegetation. In the final stage, I've just imported the finalized height map I got from Gaea into UE.

Landscape Material

The landscape material has advenced processes in itself to break tiling. Also I have so many controls on Different texture maps and Color, contrast, brightness etc. Additionally, this material let us to scatter our grass and plant assets procedurally on specific texture.

Block-Out Scene

Before modelling real assets I've created a block-out scene to determine what size should be all the assets and their possitions.

Creating Textures

I've created procedural wooden and stone wall texture to get as close as possible to my reference. Also using the procedural method helped me to change some parameters to get slightly different versions of the same texture. For example, I used the same texture but with different parameters for fences.

This is the same texture I used for both hobbitholes and fences but the parameters are different

This is the procedurally created stone wall texture

AI-generated texture

I used AI to generate "Willow Wicker Lawn Edging Fence" and created texture maps to replicate real ones. This method saved me a lot of performance in the scene because we are not using real geometry to show the depth.

Texture resolution is 128x128

Master material

I used an advanced detail mapping method for the master material. This method helps texture to pretend like it is high resolution even though, it is low resolution. With the help of this, I saved so much texture memory and gained fps.

In order to use this method efficiently, I've created texture arrays and packed textures. Subsequently, I used less amount of operation in shader graph and reduced the workflow in pixel shader. Therfore, this method optimized my scene a lot.

I have a greyscale value stored in the alpha channel of my base colour to pick the correct detail normal map from the texture array. The middle texture is a mask texture. The last one stores normal map data in the red and green channels, roughness data in the blue channel and ambient occlusion data in the alpha channel. In this way, I saved so many texture memories and reduced workflow in pixel shader.

Vegetation

To increase the believability, I had to create unique tree and grass assets which fit with our scene very well. I used SpeedTree for it.

Wind animation

I love seeing grasses and trees blow on the wind in real life. Therefore, I've created advanced wind animation. It increased the liveness of the scene.