****! I almost thought it was an actual photo.
Not that I don’t believe you, but to satisfy BlueBudgie’s insatiable disbelief, maybe post 2 pictures of your scene, one fully rendered and one wireframe, in the UE4 editor?
no no, that’s fine. With Billboards in the background it makes sense. That’s pretty much compositing. I was just wondering in case there are 3D meshes in the background makign up the forest how that is possible. Thing is, we did this kind of compositing in the past a lot with VUE. It was like sports to do such 3D-2D mixes in scenes with photos or billboards. It is nice to see that UE4 has reached that level in rendering!
, if you have not done it already, do not forget to tick early Z on both opaque and masked meshes in the project settings before ramping down the meshes. Also tweak the shadows in the baseconfig.ini to be just good enough and cheaper. That should double the framerate.
Oh my… totally missed that Gem. Wonderful works!
this is amazing! but how do you do it? do you 3d scan a lot or is it just hand made? 
I would love to know how you do it too, like what is your workflow?
Specially that snow scene, soooo beautiful!!
Much appreciated and looking forward to it 
Two very quick new foliage tests (ignore the backdrops- just wanted something quick to test the foliage in)
Polycount is 50K tris for the larger tree, and 16K tris for the smaller foliage- nature is really a hard one to get right- if you go for ultimate optimization with 2D planes, it looks flat and unrealistic, but if you go too high, obviously it wouldn’t be usable for a game. I found around 50K tris for the trees that I have been making was a nice tradeoff between quality and performance- each leaf has simple geometry and gives the overall shading a lot more depth than 2D planes- with this LOD only viewable up close and much less dense models after a certain radius, I think a huge forest of this foliage is possible. (Time to put that to the test- will post progress!)
EDIT: Modeling each leaf as a plane may bounce the light better but it gets far too expensive for realtime use- I got really nice results from typical masked plane cards- from over 100K tris on the big trees down to about 8K tris!
The top one with the tree tops (or bushes?) looks great! (bit too dark maybe).
The shadows are too sharp in my opinion. That’s not happening in real life unless the object is very close to its shadow.
You could make the shadows blurrier, also more for distant trees, in the baseconfig.ini and that would also boost framerate a lot. Shadows, especially long ones that cover a lot of geometry (morning/evening), are at least in the same performance heavy category than polygons themselves, if not worse.
50k with LODs sound good if the focus is on trees. Will be interesting to see where you arrive.
Here is what we arrived for our (physics enabled and climbable) hero trees, it’s like 30k-40k tris per tree, and squeezed into a GTX780 with good shadows at 60fps/1920x980 with lots of foliage/small trees in the scene as well.
Thanks for the feedback Your trees look good!
Here’s a quick scene from today testing new foliage assets- still rough WIP testing for now!
I like it. Trees can be difficult because of how light bounces off them, but these look pretty good. Usually in my work, in 3ds max, we don’t put much time into trees because it’ll skyrocket the render time for the scene. If UE4 can handle more realistic trees at real-time, I may have to convince my boss to switch over completely!
Looks amazing!
I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Quixel Megascans library recently which is a literal game changer for beautiful scanned input textures! Spending most of my time working on a high quality foliage pipeline for UE4, here is a quick new scene using GrowFX for the foliage geometry creation, and Megascans textures!
https://cdn2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/725/114/small/eoin-o-broin-02.jpg?1464985168
https://cdn0.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/725/112/small/eoin-o-broin-01.jpg?1464985162
Wow, that looks awesome! How do you get access to the Megascans library? Is it included in the Quixel 2.0 suite? They look really handy!
Megascans is a gamechanger. Pun intended. It’s on its way…
Those look really good.
Thanks 
@das8track No the Megascans library is separate to the suite, it will be released as a standalone service!
Here is a quick and dirty scene I made today testing ONE instanced tree mesh with LODs- my aim was to get a nice overall grading and sense of space without focusing on the small details- close up trees are 30K tris, slightly further away are 9000 tris, and slightly further than that go down to 500 tris! Makes large forests running at decent frame rates very possible! Still much more testing to do on this front with a lot more variety in tree meshes and foliage, but it is a start Trees were created using GrowFX.
https://cdn0.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/745/864/small/eoin-o-broin-04.jpg?1465238410
If you’re trying to get a good sense of space, I would change the camera angle because I can’t really tell what I’m looking at. The ferns completely cover the ground so it’s hard to see what’s going on there:)
Absolutely keep posting WIP!
One more: the images above are for me an absolute reference. You have to realize how good this is when you compare different render techniques. Comparing real time rendering in UE4, where you fake everything as good as possible, and then true path tracing methods, where you try to be as physically correct as possible, you have to say that the ‘fake-as-good-as-possible’ method is almost equal.
I mean our man did some nature Octane renders some time ago with a scattering tool that he wrote. You look at them and then you look at your images (you are the better artist ) you would not be able to say that one is UE4 and one is Octane. That is amazing. You would not be able to render those images any better with 3dsmax or Octane or whatever. And UE4 is real-time 60fps.