RealBiomes – Scots Pine Forest [UE4-5] v1.2

The most comprehensive and realistic Scots Pine environment available. Fully scan-based, game-ready assets with up to 8k textures, distance billboards, complete with various Sub-Biomes to create incredible forest diversity. Quickly paint and procedurally generate the Sub-Biomes with our intuitive "BiomePainter" workflow and bring the forest alive with our scalable wind system. Use included Blueprint tools to help you create faster. Comes with two fully generated example maps complete with distance meshes and various example lighting conditions. Main Map measures 1 square kilometer and the experimental one measures 64 square kilometers.

NEXT-GEN VISUALS: Our goal is to provide the best possible visuals quality while still being scalable enough to run on average hardware. Comes with some of the most detailed game-ready assets available online. All of our assets and tileables are fully 3D Scans based and include up to 8k texture resolution for incredible close-up detail.

GAME READY: All of our assets are fully game-ready with LODs, wind, collision, optimized view distances, and LOD ratios out of the box.

MULTIPLE SUB-BIOMES: Choose between 6 different Sub-Biomes; Mossy, Mixed, Dry, Border, Dead, and Open Fields, all ready to be generated with their own unique properties and visual identities.

PROCEDURAL WORKFLOW: Use our BiomePainter workflow to quickly paint and generate the different Sub-Biomes which allows you to create incredibly varied environments with minimal effort and time spent. We are fully utilizing Unreal's procedural systems to make sure that every world you create is both unique and organic feeling.

MICRO TO MACRO: From small ground scatter to massive cliffs and distance meshes, our biome packs are much more than just a simple forest, it allows you to compose vast landscapes that hold up no matter where you look.

EXAMPLE MAPS: Our pack comes with a fully generated 1km2 example map. This includes a beautifully composed area with roads, mudslides, and massive cliffs as well as high detail distance mountain meshes. Furthermore, we ship a fully generated 64km2 example map. This includes the same areas as the 1km2 example map but much vaster spaces. Keep in mind this is an experimental addition and due to engine-related issues/limitations, it is not the most optimized experience. In UE5, there's currently a bug that crashes the 64km2 map when more sublevels are added - this is our of our control and up to Epic Games to fix. We include a much lighter and smoother 1K map for this reason and label this map experimental.

LIGHTING: Our pack comes with 3 different lighting conditions, standard, dawn, and stormy, complete with respective HDRIs. A good baseline to help you create your own look. In 4.27+, BP_RB_Manager can be used to easily cycle between lighting conditions.

SHADERS: Comes with 4 comprehensive master materials all containing a wide range of abilities such as multi-texture blending, PDO shadows, Macro/Detail maps, object to landscape blending, per instance color variation, displacement mapping/offset bump mapping, and much more. We also include MPC's to control wind and wetness. Wetness is a feature for leaves-only.

BLUEPRINTS: To help speed up to medium to large scale level creation we made a SplineTool Blueprint, allowing for quick repeated placement and bending of static meshes such as cliffs, mudslides, roads, and more. We also include a Wind controller which allows for a more visual way of wind adjustment. In 4.27+, we ship a manager blueprint that allows users to easily cycle between all our lighting scenarios and also manage scalability easily.

ASSET LIST:

Trees: 8
Trees-Small/Saplings: 9
Trees-Sick/Dead: 4
Trees-Broken/Rotten: 7
Rocks: 24
Cliffs: 16
Mudslide: 13
Roads/Paths: 7
Plants: 29
Ground Scatter: 33
Ground Bases: 6

IMPORTANT NOTES: We found performance to be quite inconsistent across engine versions. As of 5.0, Lumen over-occludes foliage and is thus not a great choice for our scenes which are full of vegetation. Expected to be fixed in future Unreal Engine versions. Nanite currently does not work with Landscape Grass or Vegetation, both of which we heavily utilize. Hence we are not using Nanite currently.The 64km2 experimental map is a very heavy map to load due to the amount of content/size. Weaker machines may struggle with it based on our tests on a laptop with an i7 and a GTX 970m. In UE5, loading additional sublevels into it leads to a crash, unlike in 4.20-4.27. This is an Unreal Engine bug and out of our control. To get the full "Next-Gen" experience, you will need to check the "Lighting Info" and "Cinematic Settings" section in our documentation.
Please enable: Edit -> Project Settings -> Search: distance fields -> Check "Generate Mesh Distance Fields" tickbox -> restart engine. Without this, the lighting will not look correct!!
Please enable: Edit -> Editor Preferences -> Search: procedural -> Check "Procedural Foliage".
Some of the objects we have scanned weigh several tons and many meters. Hence our rocks and cliffs usually don't have undersides.

Disclaimer: Showcased lighting not necessarily representative of final product.

Technical Details:

Features:

Next Generation visual fidelity
3D Scanned assets and tileables
Up to 8K texture resolution
6 different Sub-Biomes to choose from: Grassy Fields, Forest Border, Dead Forest, Dry Forest, Mixed Forest, Mossy Forest
Intuitive BiomePainter procedural workflow -> Create a varied forest by painting and then generating via 1 click.
Detailed 1 square kilometer example map
Massive 64 square kilometer example map (experimental)
RealBiomes Manager Blueprint for easy tweaking of Lighting Scenarios and Scalability
Optimized LODs and Billboards
Distance meshes
4 comprehensive master shaders
Cloud shadows material
Spline Tool Blueprint
Global vegetation wetness material function
Scalable wind system
FakePOM: Detailed PDO Shadows
AutoSlope Material
Fully Game Ready and optimized

We do not recommend using RealBiomes with Movie Render Queue. Foliage heavy scenes do not work well with UE Raytracing and RealBiomes is no exception to that rule.

Number of Unique Meshes: 156

Collision: Yes

Vertex Count: 10-60000

LODs: All meshes have 1-6 LODs

Number of Materials and Material Instances: 65

Number of Textures: 106

Texture Resolutions: 2k-8k

Platform: PC