Wind's Howling, Procedural UE4 Environment

Hot on the heels of the UE5 announcement, which sent everyone's expectations of anything Unreal related through the roof, I am back with some regular, non-unlimited triangles peasant environment art :D

It's... another fully procedural forest. This one started out as "I shall definitely not make another procedural forest" and then sort of evolved into "I'll make another procedural forest".
We are all about proceduralism at Embark Studios, but since I am not smart enough to create my own procedural tools, I enjoy seeing how far I can push UE4's native tools towards that goal.
While my last scene was sort of warm and cozy, this time I wanted to do something that felt a bit more wet and cold. Like Sweden 8 months of the year!

One of the things that I was not happy with last time was that there was hardly any movement in the trees, so this time I used Unreal's PivotPainter2 shader to drive the movement of the vegetation and hooked that up to some Global Parameters for wind control.

Now, after finishing the video I realize that the wind movement is extremely hard to see with camera panning, but its there, I promise! This is funny cause of the name i chose for the project. #SemiFail

I also wanted water so I would get to build a water shader, I like water shaders, and snow!

If I was to summarize my visual goal in a sentence: Picture a place where Geralt of Rivia would do battle with some evil monster!

Once again I used Procedural Foliage Volumes to populate all of the 1x1 km of the landscape, but this time I spent some more time setting up the rules for the scattering. Turns out you can do a lot with the Foliage Volumes! It's a fun way to work, I've literally spent hours just flying around and exploring my own environment, finding cool spots and views :P

As usual, all scans are my own, scanned with a Nikon D850.

I used Blender for all modelling and preparation of assets(and also for the cutting and rendering of the final video!). Substance Suite for delighting and scan cleanup, as well as some texture creation, like the water normal. The heightfield was generated in Houdini by my colleague Darko Pracic:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qAAd8z

I then used World Machine to generate some simple Material Masks to drive the scattering.

One last note, this is not meant to be a gameplay space per say, its more of a test of "Can I build a believable forest space with minimum manual placement". So it is a bit chaotic, as most forests are, but I am happy with it :)

Hope you like it!