Help Needed: Creating a Realistic Forest Scene in UEFN

[besthillex]

Hello! I hope you’re well.
I’m trying to create a realistic and optimized forest scene in UEFN: something as visually immersive as the images, with good lighting, foliage, trees, and a natural environment. But I’m struggling to get the result I want, especially with the lighting and foliage settings. I’d greatly appreciate any guidance or recommendations on how to achieve this.

So far, what I’ve done is:

I started by migrating assets from Megascans projects like Medieval Village and European Beech to my UEFN project.

After migrating and placing the assets, when I tried to log into Fortnite, UEFN would crash. I would get a screen saying “Make Assets Private,” and nothing would work properly.

So I deleted everything and decided to try using assets from the Fab marketplace directly in UEFN, as they should be compatible.

I imported some assets, and everything looked good when I dragged them into the scene: materials and meshes appeared correctly. But when using Foliage Mode, only the static mesh appeared, with no textures or materials.

Another issue is that Fab for UEFN doesn’t offer full trees, only trunks or partial assets, so I used them only to test the workflow.

I also noticed that in Epic’s The Forest Guardian map, the foliage and lighting are very realistic, although performance is significantly reduced.

In conclusion, I would like to know how to:

• Create a realistic and optimized forest scene in UEFN
• Manage lighting properly for natural results
• Find the best assets for foliage, trees, and the environment
• Avoid issues such as materials not displaying in foliage mode

I would appreciate any help or suggestions. Thank you very much!

[Astrotronic]

Hello,

That’s a lot to consider for just one thread - If you want to focus on the “when using Foliage Mode, only the static mesh appeared, with no textures or materials” you should respond in the thread you made for that issue.

There’s many ways to approach this, here’s an idea for one approach.

Start with just 1 tree. Put down a forest of them. Now focus on how they illuminate when the light hits them. What does their shadows look like? (Can you see individual leaves in shadows) - Are you ok with things looking terrible on mobile/switch/performance mode?

Through this, you’ll find what type of tree assets work best for you.

Also It could be good to just focus on 1 ‘view’ - hold CTRL and press a number key to set a view bookmark. You could then have a very precise focus area to iterate on when designing the forest.

If you want to post pics of your WIP forest we could talk about specific elements.

[besthillex]

Hi, thank you so much for responding!
I followed your advice and created a small forest with a single tree, using a marker to focus on one point and observe the changes. I also watched some YouTube videos for additional help. So far, this is what I’ve been working on. I’m trying to get as close as possible to the reference image, but it’s been a bit challenging. That said, I don’t think it’s looking that bad!

My UEFN project:

Reference image:

[Astrotronic]

Thanks for sharing, That looks really similar.

At this point I think you’d just need to tweak the post-process volume settings. The biggest difference I’m seeing in the pictures is the ‘bloom’ effect is stronger in your target image.

[besthillex]

Update #1
I’ve changed several aspects of the landscape, such as the soil and foliage. I’ve also added new post-processing materials and adjusted the lighting.
This is how I’m doing so far. Obviously, we still need to add vegetation and paint the entire 3.6 km x 3.6 km landscape.
If you have any recommendations, please feel free to comment!