UE5

Tutorials I used

Cloth simulation

Niagara VFX

Waterfall VFX tutorial

making caves tutorial:

island and water tutorial

waves settings

i decided to make a new ue5 project as my other one wasnt scaled properly. this time, i used the character as a reference for the size of my island.

to get started faster, i used the procedurally generated landscape plugin.

added the water before sculpting more of the landscape so i have a better idea of where it can flow.

landscape materials

followed a video tutorial however the result was clearly repetitive so I copied the material nodes from the lecture. However trying to migrate the uassets for materials would not work. the assets appear in the file explorer in the correct place but do not show up in the content browser.

i found out this is likely because the example project was made in version 5.4.4, while the version i am using is 5.3.2

trying to copy and paste the nodes didn’t work either as some of the nodes (material expression function input) couldn’t be copied over

tried switching unreal engine version to 5.3 and migrate it over but had the same issue. so i decided to stay using the simpler landscape material and break it up by painting more variety of layers and also using quixcel bridge assets and megascans

changed the colour of the butterfly vfx that i downloaded from realistic starter vfx pack volume 2 by going into the material nodes.

starting to work on the composition and arranging the three elements.

the lighting was inconsistent so i changed the min and max exposure values to be the same.

used image of trees as texture and used world planar offset to make them always face the camera

making banners with cloth physics

downloaded fern assets from fab and used them in my project, edited the material instance to make them darker.

adding cliffs and rocks

when opening my project, it took a while to load all the textures, and i noticed that the more simple grey rock textures compliment the scene a lot more than the more busy chaotic version as it doesnt draw any attention away from the main focal points.

so i made my own material and colour matched it to the non textured rocks and added the normal map and applied it to all the cliffs.

whilst doing this i also noticed that my grass textures werent loading properly either, not showing the transparency in the correct areas.

this could be due to fab not being connected fully to the pc im working on

for some reason the parent material was missing in the material instance for the grass

so i recreated the material with the textures provided and applied it to the material instance to fix the problem

there was still the problem of the texture becoming less transparent when i moved the camera further away however i fixed this by assigning it the billboard textrue and copy pasting the world position offset nodes that i used for the trees

finally i made the grass darker with a multiply node.

to animate the boat i first combined the static meshes into one static mesh and then put it in a blueprint.

i followed this tutorial:

How to Make a Boat Float in Unreal Engine 5 – Buoyancy Tutorial

when trying to animate the boat using a buoyancy blueprint and adding pontoons, it just kept flipping over backwards and falling off the side of the landscape into the abyss.

by adjusting the pontoons and changing the waves of the water body ocean i was able to stabilize the boat and have it gently sway.

i had to adjust the landscape so the water was deep enough for the boat to not collide with the floor

I experimented with cloth simulations and decided to try adding banners to the scene. I set up the cloth and added wind to the scene to make it dynamic.

painted the vertices i wanted to be affected by the simulation

feedback

some final feedback i received was to add a railing to the path to guide the viewers eye throughout the scene, and make it so there wasn’t a large area bare of assets.

added textures to the banners

did some more changes to the landscape and foliage.