Aggressive LODs provide more breathing room to populate your scene with more assets, while allowing your assets to shine up close.

Smaller details

Once I had the cave walls mostly completed, I turned my attention to the smaller details. I thought about what kind of smaller details I wanted in my scene, and decided on 3 major types. Smaller living foliage, mushrooms, and larger dead trees. These three elements gave me a nice splash of color and variety. Like everything in the scene, I’ve tweaked the materials to my needs to help them integrate into the scene more seamlessly (which I will discuss later). When deciding on how to scatter and place these meshes, I used a combination of logical placement (where would these objects be if this scene were real), and compositional placement (where would these assets look best visually). Examples of logical placement include green vegetation closer to the water, a greater number of mushrooms on the dead log/stump, and fallen leaves in the water (there are trees around the opening to the cave that blow in the wind and give the lighting and shadows some motion). The compositional placement is based on your camera angles, lighting, and focal points, and differs with each scene. This is really where you get to use your artistic eye. The placement of minor assets was done in tandem with the lighting, and they both impacted each other. Overall, much like the rock pieces for the cave walls, everything was placed mostly by hand one at a time. I used the single instance mode of the foliage tool for the majority of my foliage placement. If you’re not working on a massive scene, it pays to be very deliberate with placement rather than leaving it up to the foliage brush to place it randomly. The branches in the water are actually recycled from the standing tree asset, always find ways to creatively reuse assets, especially when you have a tight time budget.

For fun, I added subtle animations to the lighting and water in the scene.

Materials

Because the scene was exploratory, I originally had a lot more assets than I used in the final scene. Having so many assets to experiment with and having to create materials for each can be a huge time sink. To counteract this, I used master materials, one for each major style of object. One for leafy foliage, one for mushrooms, one for objects without moss (since moss uses a fuzz map), and one for objects with moss. In each of these master materials, I built parameters that allow me to easily tweak each asset to my needs much faster than if I had made a separate material for each asset. Keeping in mind I was working on a speed scene, I kept my materials very simple and instead focused on dialing in the areas that make the largest difference to a material, such as albedo and roughness. You can get a material to 90% in 10-20% of the time it would take to get it to 98%, and resisting the urge to get lost in the details is important when on a tight time budget. For example, the rock assets I used are designed for an arid climate, but my cave scene is a damp and humid environment, so I darkened the albedo a bit and reduced the roughness to simulate moisture on the rocks. For a great overview of creating master materials for Megascans check out Jonathan Holmes’ livestream. The megascans materials are already excellent, however, so a stronger focus on lighting is going to be the fastest and easiest method to get scan data to shine.