UE5 R&D Forest Environment

I created this real-time forest environment in UE5, to serve as an animated background for promotional pieces for Dream Drop Studios first project. The environment also serves as an R&D project for me. As I am developing an environment pipeline for our game project, and needed to experiment with options for environment building techniques and workflows. I landed on a workflow of using a RVT and heightfield mesh combo for the landscape, to allow for displacement and easy blending between environment assets and the landscape underneath. I had to troubleshoot quite a bit to get the heightfield mesh to be high resolution, and optimized, but I eventually got it handled. Setting up and learning the workflow for future, much larger scale environments. The environment runs at 60 fps average, and took about 3 weeks to complete including all the time I spent troubleshooting. Most assets are kitbashed Quixel assets, besides the main path mesh, which I modeled and textured myself using Blender and Quixel Mixer. All meshes in the environment besides the trees, have a RVT based blending material applied to them, to blend the whole environment together and remove seams between intersecting meshes.