Forgotten Place (UE5)

Another addition to my portfolio, I wanted to be adventurous with this one and created one of the biggest environments I've made so far.
The main idea of the environment was the old building/temple area and surrounding areas, overtime I developed it more towards being overgrown and abandoned as I felt it looked too plain and boring just being grassplains and a building, I'm quite proud of this piece with particularly focusing on the foliage, lighting and VFX.

The main focus of this piece was to develop and learn new tools and techniques in Unreal Engine and general environment creation as well as show off skills I have developed over the last few year. I was very interesting in using UE5's nanite technologies for the foliage and landscape with UE 5.3 adding displacement to landscapes allowing high amounts of detail for ground materials without the performance cost. I also used this as a chance to learn more how to optimize nanite foliage to maintain good performance while retaining quality. I also learned UE5's new cloth system which works so much better than UE4's and makes adding realistic cloth simulation and variables quite fast, also I took this chance to learn more about Niagara particle systems and all of the leaves and grass seen flowing around are made with those systems as well as using fog and various other effects to lend to the atmosphere.