UE Foliage
This is a multi-part tutorial on creating virtual worls in Unreal Engine. This tutorial assumes you have a basic understanding of 3D work but no prior experience is necessary.
Please contact the Creative Technology Lab for questions or assistance.
Foliage Tool
The foliage tool in Unreal Engine allows you to quickly paint sets of assets on a landscape. Like the name suggests, this tool is primarily used for trees and plants, to create scenes which might contain thousands of trees or vast grasslands. This tool saves us the effort of individually placing many assets and automates it for us.
But first we need a pack of foliage assets to use...
Megascans Foliage Packs
Apart from small assets and materials, Quixel also releases megascans, which are large scans of created assets for us to use in Unreal Engine. We will be using one of these packs for our scene.
Open the Epic Games Launcher and to the Unreal Engine window. There, we will go to the Marketplace tab and search the categories for the Megascans.
The pack we want to import is called the Megascans Trees: European Black Alder.
Find this pack, download it, and add it to your project.
Foliage Painting
We will now go over the steps needed to start adding instanced foliage.
- To access the foliage tool, first change the editor mode to Foliage on the top left of your screen.
- You have to then specify which trees/bushes/grasses you want to use by clicking the +Foliage button.
As you can see, I have added 4 types of trees to my selection and ticked all the boxes.
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You can then change your Brush size and Paint Density.
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Brush Size will affect the size of your painting area.
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Paint Density will affect how densely your foliage is placed. A lower density will place foliage more sparsely and vice versa.
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Filling your landscape (optional)
Adding large tree assets is usually enough to make a landscape look realistic. However, if you feel like you want to add more assets to fill out your scene, the foliage packs also contain smaller plants that you can add to your scene.
As shown below, it is possible to add these in and paint your landscape with them to make it look more realistic.
I have added smaller plants and painted them at a higher density, which is why there is more of them (500-600) in my scene.
To continue with this tutorial, please follow the next article in this series.