Nordic Conifer Biome

Fair Warning, this post contains alot of images, so get your scrolling finger ready!

This project is kind of the completion of the circle for me, my very first Photogrammetry project back in 2017 was a small coniferous forest scene. It was good for what it was, scanned with an Iphone 5? 6 maybe? and zero prior knowledge about photogrammetry. But I have learned a lot since then and always wanted to revisit that theme and do it properly, with everything new I have learned, and with proper equipment.
So I have been working on this for the past 2 years, a lot of iteration and a few side projects have come in between, but this is the culmination of all my previous works with procedural forests these past years.

It is big, like silly big, 2x2km of winding paths, deep forest groves, swamps, lakes and fields. I still get lost myself when running around in there, and I created the damn thing! I have based this on a location close to where I live that contains all of this.

I see myself as a game maker, so just making something that looks pretty but does not run well, holds little interest for me any more. I want to create places you can explore on your own.

The goal from the beginning was to approach this the same way I would any game-production, going through all the same brutal optimization steps. I wanted to have it running at 60fps on my regular GTX1080, with subgoals of a maximum of 10 million tris, 2k draw calls per frame and textures being within the default Unreal StreamingPool budget. These are numbers I feel should be very doable on the current generation of PC/PS5/XboxSX. Granted, these are just my guesses on my part, I have no idea what the new consoles are capable of, but hey, I had to pick some numbers and these felt ok!
The final 2x2km scene is running at around 60-80 fps on my GTX1080 desktop, depending on the area, so mission successful :)

All content is scanned and created from scratch, by hand, by myself. The earlier parts of the project was scanned using a Nikon D850 with a 24mm lens, but that camera got lost in a rainy accident, so I have now gone mirrorless with a Nikon Z7 Mk2. Resolution reigns supreme!

The music I choose for the video is Far Horizons by Jeremy Soule of the Skyrim OST. It was my go to mood song throughout most of the project, so it seemed fitting :)

All made in Unreal Engine 4.26 using fully dynamic lighting, of course!

This has been a real beast of a project that has terrorized my life for a long time, is it perfect? no far from it. But I am happy with where it ended up. Now I really need to go and do some smaller things for a while :P

An asset pack containing everything used to create this is available on Unreal Marketplace :)