I’ve been learning Unreal Engine 5 and just finished a small forest environment as my first test project. It’s a peaceful, low-light scene with fog, dynamic lighting using Lumen, and basic foliage setup.
I didn’t use any advanced assets — just Megascans, a few free models, and some manual tweaking. Mostly, I wanted to learn lighting, atmosphere, and how to build a scene from scratch.
It’s simple, but I’m happy with it as a first try. Let me know if anyone has tips on improving mood or performance for small scenes like this!
Welcome to UE! Glad you are enjoying it, and accomplished your first scene. The community has a lot of docs to continue learning and building your skills. Performance wise, you can check the learning path below, it covers multiple lessons on how to optimize any project:
As for mood, it’s a matter of what goal you have in mind. Would the scene remain peaceful all the time? Or evolve into something different? It will all depend on your lighting, and sounds. Start by adding ambient sounds to your scene, and further adjusting your lights, maybe for a cinematic feel, as seen in the following example. Hope these resourcers are useful for your project, good luck!