Quixel has recently caught up with Thuan Nguyen Minh Duong to learn about the artist’s production process behind his not-too-distant future urban jungles.
Here are the assets that I used for this project. They include grass, road, asphalt, concrete, etc. For the textures, I used 4K versions and of the assets and materials, and for 3D assets, I used LOD 1 and 4K textures.
I did not use atlases since it takes quite some time to prepare them, and I really needed to cut anytime so that I could bring this project to life. So 3D assets, decals, and surface scans from the Megascans library were my go-to for this project.
After I had chosen all the asset I needed, I used Bridge to export them to UE4. The process is very fast; only 1 click away from using your assets of choice in UE4, skipping all the many steps such as importing, naming, setting the materials, and so forth.
The master materials provided by Quixel are a step away from perfection. With a little tweaking, they fit most projects, in my opinion.
Megascans in Unreal Engine 4
(All material instances in my project)
(Default Foliage material by Megascans)
You actually have to Vertex Paint the foliages to get a windy effect on them. So I made a few changes, as above, to apply Vertex Displacement wind effect en-mass by simply bypassing the Vertex Color node.
3D scans come with auto LOD in UE4, but the default setting is not the best, so I went to LOD settings and manually set the screen size associated with LOD levels to 0.75, 0.5, and 0.25 for optimization of the vegetation.