It was fascinating setting up this system and then playing my level to discover the beauty of nature — as procedurally scattered by a computer! It would be interesting to study different procedural scattering tools and techniques like Houdini. I also picked up a thing or two for my project by reading how procedural technology was used in Ghost Recon: Wildlands.

Lessons Learnt

I’m slowly becoming happy with the results of my project but there are still plenty of things I have to do better. My goal here was to establish a strong foundation and to learn and push my optimization skills further. Two things I still need to cross off my mental to-do list are finalizing the day and night cycle and adding a system that can create different weather situations. I would like to add more content, like lakes and caves, through procedural techniques. It would also be interesting to add some gameplay there with blueprints. The level and assets already have colliders and rigid bodies working so it would be fun to add some NPC characters into the mix as well.

This project helped me approach dynamic lighting as a system that consists of different components that need to work well together. Changing values over time can end up looking good enough and can be easy to set up. I also figured out what lighting features I should use and learned to keep things as simple as possible.

Having previously worked with mobile games and now stepping into VR territory, I’m starting to understand how much things can cost and how to fake things as much (and as best!) as possible. I recommend everyone giving procedural tools a try because UE’s built in system is a pretty awesome starting point!