VIDEO STRONG SANDSTORM , VIDEO QUICK START , VIDEO SANDSTORM CUSTOMIZATION , VIDEO OVERVIEW
This UE5 pack is designed to help you create in a less than 10 minute a huge open world scene, procedurally textured and populated with desert specific foliage and rocks. All assets are very well optimized for huge worlds (the example map is a 64 square km rocky desert, 8k resolution). Just like my previous ecosystem packs, Landscape Procedural Desert - Sandstorm comes with a very powerful and highly customizable auto-material with 12 layers. The pack also includes procedural foliage spawners to quickly populate your world with foliage in a few clicks. It also contains desert specific effects (sandstorm effect and heat-haze effect).
All trees have billboards (every billboard is just 2 triangles) and the 3d foliage such as desert grass/plants are automatically spawned around the player by the auto-material. The auto-material will adapt to any landscape you have, it doesn't matter if you import a heightmap, you sculpt the landscape with alpha brushes or you use the classic sculpting tool from Unreal Engine 5. All foliage have LODs and the rocks are nanite enabled.
For very realistic results, I recommend using this pack in combination with a real-world heightmap/landscape
The assets are as optimized as possible but, let's not forget that Lumen is real time global illumination system, so for lower end computers, there will be performance issues. For those cases I recommend the following changes into Project Settings - Rendering:
1. Disable Lumen
2. Disable reflection or change it from Lumen to Screen Space
3. Replace Virtual Shadow Maps with Shadow Maps (this alone will give you at least 10-15 fps more). As soon as foliage will be nanite enabled in Unreal Engine, all those optimization issues will disappear.
On the other hand, if You want to use the pack at it's full potential, I recommend using Lumen. In order to enable Lumen (if it is not already enabled) you should go to Project Settings/Engine/Rendering and make sure you have the following setup:
- Dynamic Global Illumination Method - LUMEN
- Reflection Method - LUMEN
- Shadow Map Method - Virtual Shadow Maps
The sandstorm and heat-haze effects, are in fact materials applied on a plane in front of the player and because of this, the effects are very cheap from the GPU resources consumptions point of view. Because of this method, the effects can be used on huge maps without having a performance impact proportional to the landscape size. So if you want to use the sandstorm or heat-haze effect with your own character, all you have to do is to add a plane component to your character (disable cast shadows for the plane) for each effect and apply to the plane one of the effects materials. Use as model, the character from this pack, just to be sure you are doing everything right. The sandstorm material should be placed first at about 40-80 units in front of the player and the heat-haze plane/material should be placed at about 500 - 700 units in front of the player. If you don't respect the distances, it is not a problem but, in this case you will have to tweak the materials parameters a little bit to look good.
This product supports Lumen for Unreal Engine 5.0 + .
All the materials are highly customizable. Altogether, there are more than 100 parameters that you can tweak to personalize the final look of the desert. You will be able to modify parameters like: wind strength, intensity, speed, sandstorm effect strength, seed, intensity, speed, foliage color, color variation multiplier, heat haze intensity, tiling, speed and much more.
It is designed for huge open-world games but can also be used for small environments. Everything is procedurally generated: landscape material, foliage, rocks etc. With this pack you can create a huge open world desert in less than 10 minutes.
