Overgrown Jungle Path In UE5

Step into this foliage-filled article with Artem as he breaks down his jungle path scene. Discover how Artem crafted a breath-taking natural and vibrant piece with topics such as set-dressing, foliage creation and lighting as well as his tips for anyone looking to create highly vegetated environments.

Intro

Hey everyone! I am Artem Ostapchuk, a 3D Environment Artist, currently located in Warsaw, Poland. I have worked on several VR and PC UE4 projects, both realistic and stylized.

As a child, I drew platformer games and played a lot of games, but never knew that I’ll end up in gamedev. Only years later I discovered 3D art and immediately fell in love with it. It's a great pleasure to work in such a creative industry, gain and share experience, and even get paid for it:) It’s also a great community where people have common interests, but each with unique stories. I am glad that so many people get to share their experiences and pipelines through breakdowns - that’s a great source of motivation and knowledge, and I will gladly follow them with this breakdown of my latest UE5 environment “Jungle Path Scene”.

Composition

When planning this environment I had a few goals in mind - I wanted to extend my foliage creation skills and test out Unreal Engine 5 (even if Nanite doesn't work with transparent objects yet). With foliage in mind, I started to search catching-eye concepts and gain references for my environment. At the time I doubted whether to make this environment stylized (in a style close to Kena: Bridge of spirits, which I liked very much) or realistic. Later I decided to make it realistic. For my main reference I used a concept called Dragon Bone by Dawnpu at Art vision studio which instantly got my attention because of colours and light, and also because there’s a lot of foliage, lianas, moss - full spectre of foliage skills to work on.

Later I changed composition and some elements to my liking, but the main idea of strong directional light and hero prop stays the same. I tried to create a somewhat radial composition where foliage guides the viewer from one point of interest to another, and added a road to connect foreground and background (also to tell a story, and because it could make a good level path).

I outlined the main point of interest as red, view guides as blue and road as green. I tried to rotate and place foliage in such a way that it drew attention back to the main point of interest. Which in turn was curved and in its own way served as a bridge between right and left parts of the scene.

Colour Palette

I really liked the warm yellow and green colours of the concept and I pushed them even further in my scene. Strong direct and especially indirect lighting were of great help in achieving this feeling of a place long forgotten by anyone but nature.

Story

There are few elements in this scene which give a viewer a glimpse of what this place used to be, but don’t give answers as well. Bones indicate that some time ago it was a dangerous place to be, but there are also human made structures placed around road which tells us that humans got an upper hand over these creatures and used this path to get through the jungle. However, it was a long time ago, because those ruins are overgrown by trees and foliage. I was thinking about adding more human made elements to this scene, but decided that foliage will take the main stage in this environment.

Foliage

Breaking down foliage - there are 3 distinct layers of it, each with its own role in composition. The most impactful layer contains trees - shapes large enough to be visual attractors and silhouette components. Second layer consists of bushes and ferns. They can serve as visual points of interest since they have distinctive shapes and colours. The last consists of grass and flowers. Here you can see those layers as red, yellow and blue outlines respectively. Right placing of each layer can help create good composition.

SpeedTree

The strongest part of SpeedTree is its ability to quickly generate randomized instances of your foliage based on nodes. You also have a lot of creative freedom and can edit your foliage at any time by hand.

SpeedTree Tips

SpeedTree has a lot of sample scenes which everyone can use to learn this software. I used them to learn the program and to search for tree and foliage pipelines which will help me create this environment maintaining quality and time. Ultimately, for my pipeline I used Substance Designer for materials (sometimes also Substance Painter and ZBrush), SpeedTree and Blender for meshes and UE, obviously. Also, I remade some assets a couple of times - it's very important to not stick to the first iteration of your assets. With each iteration you see what’s working, and what’s not, what you can add and what you should definitely remove.

Here’s a small pipeline scheme describing my process of foliage creation for this scene:

Set-Dressing The Trees

The most important part of nature is its (not) chaotic growth - it depends on the atmosphere, moisture, temperature, sun availability etc. By knowing those rules you can create believable environment. However, in different biomes those rules are different. That’s why it's very important to gain as many references as possible and stick to them. Jungle areas have a very high moisture level and temperature - perfect conditions for moss and small plants. Of great help for me were the Tahiti Botanic Garden and Tropical Bark Texture reference packs. Here's the main reference board. I also created smaller reference boards for tasks I was working on.

When it comes to set-dressing the trees, there’s a great tutorial by Tyler Smith on creating overgrown foliage. It mainly uses ZBrush for this process, but for me Blender was a better choice. For lianas placement I also tried SpeedTree but the result wasn’t as good as in Blender. First, I created low-poly lianas, and then generated them on curves around trees.

For moss and small foliage I used Blender’s particle system (new geometry nodes system will have an even better result, can’t wait to test it out). First - I create low-poly moss/ leaves, ferns and place them in a separate collection. Then I create a particle system on my tree and connect my low-poly collection to the particle instances. You can also draw on your mesh with vertex groups if you want some areas on your mesh to have more or less dense foliage cover.

Common Mistakes When Creating Trees

The main mistake (which I also was making a lot of times) is to only use basic tools, not to follow references and use wrong leaf or bark materials. My trees are far from perfect, but I tried to keep those points in mind. Learn from your mistakes, ask for feedback and get inspired by better artists to push your art further.

Smaller Foliage

As shown in the pipeline scheme, for smaller foliage materials I mainly used ZBrush for heightmaps, and then exported it to Designer or Painter to create materials. In Designer, I created a small node tree which helped me create materials more quickly - for each plant I just switched input heightmaps and changed parameters.

But for some plants I used Painter when I wanted more hand drawn freedom.

Lighting

Thanks to the angle of directional light - there are nice shadows and highlights. You can clearly see bones in the middle of the scene because of good contrast. I use really strong directional and indirect lights here (value of 10 each) and added a few point and spot lights here and there.

I really like the warm light and colors in this scene - it gives an impression of a place full of life (in contrast to, for example, swamp of sorrow level from demon's souls where the atmosphere is totally different).

Reflections

There are a lot of things in UE5 which as of today, are not working or have strange behaviour. In this scene I used Lumen reflections (and also Lumen GI), and the only thing working for me in this setup was planar reflection capture. This is the only reflection source in this scene, and it works quite well for water. For foliage I had to tweak roughness and specular values so it can look nice with Lumen reflection method.

Iterations

One of the larger iterations was an iteration when I started to set dress trees with vines and testing Designer foliage node setup. When it was good enough, I started working on other things like ground materials and smaller foliage. Then I moved back and forth between those tasks ensuring everything works well together.

Ground Material

Since ground is not a main thing in this scene, I didn’t pay it as much attention as to the foliage. Nevertheless, it has an important role in connecting foreground and background. For this scene, I haven’t used Megascans. Since the point of this scene was to create foliage from zero, I didn’t want to use Megascans for ground alone. But the time also was limited so I used a couple of materials generated from my real life ground photos. Some of them I later edited in Designer adding debris or leaves with height blending. For ground I used simple landscape material with a couple of layers. Nothing special.

Set Dressing The Path

Unfortunately, UE5 doesn’t support landscape tessellation, so I had to break landscape flatness with debris and small plants. I also added a few puddles. Small rocks and debris were created in Blender and Painter. Then I placed them by hand or painted with UE foliage tool so the road doesn't look flat or uniform.

Using External Tool and Packs

There’s no need in creating all things in your environment from scratch. Some things like effects or placement blueprints won’t change your environment too much. I used a god ray blueprint from the free pack ParticleEffects to have even warmer light highlighting bones in the middle of the scene. I also created a simple Niagara effect of falling leaves for which can be seen in a video. For it I took my leaves atlas which I used for tree branches in SpeedTree, and made a couple of bended planes with leaf material. Then I imported them to UE and set them to slowly fall with Niagara system.

SOA scatter is a little good blueprint which gives you an ability to randomly place objects over other objects. It's free, so feel free to test it out. With its help I placed moss on a few rocks, but for foliage placement I used UE tools like foliage tool or procedural foliage volume.

DaVinci Resolve

If you want to make a video, or compose your movie render queue shots from UE - DaVinci Resolve is the way to go. First of all, it's free. It also has friendly user interface and has all the tools you need to make awesome video presentation of your environment. You can also do all the post process in DaVinci Resolve - thanks to its post process node system. Definitely give it a try. There are a lot of tutorials about DaVinci Resolve, but I would recommend you to watch William Faucher’s YouTube channel - he shows really awesome things about UE and DaVinci Resolve. If you read this William - thank you very much:) For my video I used UE movie render queue instead of usual renderer. This way, you can enable Anti-aliasing with temporal samples which improves the quality of your shots. You can find out more about this on William’s channel.

Finding A Good Balance Between Natural and Random When Set Dressing

For set dressing bushes and small foliage I used UE’s foliage system and procedural foliage volumes. With procedural foliage volume all you have to do - is to set parameters of to-be placed assets and place a volume where you want those assets to be spawned. This way I populated the environment with medium-sized plants, and then added smaller plants with foliage paint tool. Procedural foliage volume is a great time saver and with the right parameters you can create whole environments with 1 click. Also, you can change it’s randomization at any time you want.

One Takeaway From The Scene

I would also recommend using light functions. For example, I wanted more light in my background because big trees blocked sunlight. I could have added simple point or spot lights but it would’ve given me a strange fill light. With the help of a light function, I lit it up with some fake leaf shadows. I learnt this trick a long time ago from Polygon Academy’s YouTube channel, check it out.

What New Techniques or Topics Interest You?

There’s so much I still don’t know, and I’m excited to discover it. In my latest environments I started to make use of procedurally generated or placed assets. I started to test Houdini tools, Blender’s particle system and cloth simulation. And, of course, I tested out UE5 which has revolutionary tools and will make game development more accessible for a lot of newcomers.

Looking into the future, I want to keep growing in those areas while still keeping enough time for non-3D activities. Health and close people are the most important things in our lives, and by giving ourselves time to explore the world, we find both inspiration and motivation to create beautiful art.

Inspiration

My main sources of inspiration are nature, architecture (both ancient and modern), all digital media, and, of course, games. I try to keep track of all the interesting things I’ve seen while traveling, gaming, or simply walking around the town, and thinking about how I can use this information to create something awesome.

Being an environment artist and knowing how hard it is to make believable environments you truly appreciate the beauty of our world, creativity of people and randomness of nature.

Feedback

There are a lot of online communities nowadays where you can ask for feedback, get help with problems you have along the way, or simply talk about 3D or non-3D topics. I also have friends in 3D whom I trust and always can expect honest feedback. Sometimes I also ask feedback from my friends outside 3D because they can see it in a different way and come up with interesting ideas.

Additional Advice

The most important thing is to start. So if you don’t know where to start - start with the most simple thing. Don’t spend too much time on one thing, and keep changing tasks - this way you’ll notice details you couldn’t have seen while working on one thing alone. Take breaks, search for additional references and information, and share your knowledge with others. Also I would recommend getting off social media sometimes. Sure, it can be the main source of inspiration and information, but it’s important to clear your head from time to time.

Outro

I really like reading breakdowns - usually they have a lot of interesting information and greatly inspire you. That’s why I want to thank Experience Points for giving me the opportunity to make one. There might be some topics that I have not fully covered, so if you have questions, you can send me a message. Thank you all for reading!

artem.ostapchuk@gmail.com

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