One more thing about a detail that I should mention is if you’re creating a natural environment then you need more assets in there then you think. You need to get some more plants/ sticks/ rocks into the foliage painting tool and paint those around artistically. Once you think you’re done, go get another bunch of assets and place those around more sparingly. Doing this sort of second round really helps sell the fact that there are heaps of different plants around your area, they just don’t need to be the main focus is all.

Lighting

Lighting! It’s probably the most important thing on the list. You need photo reference and you need to copy it exactly, that’s how you get it to look real. Understand what all the different lights and lighting techniques are an experiment. If you want to know how I’ve done it then I’ll tell you that I actually hardly use the directional light in this piece. It’s the skylight doing all the work. I also enabled generate mesh distance fields in the project settings tab of unreal when starting the project. You’re going to want distance field AO (located in the settings of your skylight) if you want your real-time lighting to look good. Just remember it’s much more expensive than SSAO.