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Open World Template + Landscape Procedural Ecosystem Vol. 3 (this video shows you what you can achieve if you combine this pack with the pack Open World Template)
This UE5 pack preserves all the characteristics of my previous landscape ecosystem packs and beside this, it is specially designed to transform itself from a summer landscape into a winter landscape with a single mouse click. So by adjusting a single parameter, you will be able to add or remove snow not only on the landscape but also on the grass, trees, rocks and every static mesh from this pack. The parameters can also be adjusted during gameplay so you can gradually increase or decrease the ecosystem snow level. It can also be transformed into an autumn or spring landscape and to achieve this, all you have to do is to change a single parameter into every material instance of the static meshes. Everything is automated so it comes with a landscape smart auto-material and procedural foliage spawners to help you procedurally add trees and rocks into your map. Everything you see in this video is part of the pack, including the heightmap of the landscape which is a 64 square km, real-world heightmap created from Digital Elevation Model with 1 meter horizontal precision. The resolution of the heightmap is 8k. All foliage static meshes (grass, flowers, trees) come with LODs and the rocks are NANITE enabled. The last LOD of trees is a 2d billboard with only 2 triangles so the pack is very well optimized. 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 automatic landscape material is designed in such a way that for all 12 layers, there are 2 level of details: one level which is very detailed, when the player is closer to the texture and another one which is less detailed, when the player is further away from the texture. This way, the player will always see the right amount of details, as it is natural. Using the landscape layers, you can manually add sand, leaves, dirt, cobblestone etc. to your scene.
Populate your entire open-world in less than 2 minutes!
For very realistic results, I recommend using this pack in combination with a real-world heightmap/landscape
