Epics documentation helped a great deal with figuring out how to best implement the Two-Sided Foliage model.

When building lighting, I used a modified lightmass.ini setting that was described on the Unreal Engine forums.

All credit goes to Koola for those settings on the flip side the scene took 19 hours to bake lighting.

The glass was by far the most challenging part of this project. The problem is that even though screen space reflections are fantastic, they only reflect what’s in view of the camera, hence the name. I needed to be able to see the opposite wing of the building reflected in the glass when I looked at it even if it was out of view. So I had to resort to a very old-school way of doing things – Cubemaps. The resulting reflections are relatively inaccurate because they can only be drawn from the point of view of the capturing camera and games and visualizations used to be able to render only a small handful of them. But modern hardware and software optimisations allowed me to place one every other pane without noticeable performance loss and so I was able to capture fairly accurate reflections.

In the end I had to place 295 scene capture cameras, export their captures to textures and apply them to 295 glass materials as a cubemap. While I cringe at how inefficient that is, it still runs at over 60 fps on a gtx 770.