Thank you for the kind words 
I had been living in Scotland for a bit at that point, near a forested area that had a lake formed from an old limestone quarry. Most of the tree trunk meshes + textures came from that area, as well as some ground patches, and of course the old tire that has now become a small ecosystem.
I was going with as much photogrammetry as possible for this project, partially as an experiment to see if it was indeed faster than other methods. I found that when trying to achieve the randomness and organic feeling of nature sometimes the best artist is nature itself. Poly count of course becomes an issue quickly with leaves/ trees, but the engine handles it nicely by importing them as foliage actors.
Lighting is mainly a process of using different objects to create nice shapes for shadows and block the right amount of light from reaching the forest floor. If you spun the camera around you would see quite a few trees floating in the air at strange angles, there just to create shadow shapes for the shots. Luckily I was spending every day out in the forest by my house so I had constant reference to look at. I found it interesting that actually being in the forest gave a better reference for the experience of working in the engine than photos would have. Having textures and lighting displayed realtime while you work has a sort of immersive effect that I don’t get from working with traditional rendering engines, you are IN it rather than looking at it, if that makes sense. As always I push the saturation on indirect lighting as much as possible and dial it back at the end. There are also a few spotlights as well in there set at an extremely low strength to fine tune things.