I was digging through some old practice scenes on my hard drive, and I came across this scene I did toward the end of 2021, and I thought it was a bright idea to try and bring it from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5. Unfortunately that is not really as one and done as I would hope, but with the massive changes in rendering and mesh handling, it wasn't a surprise. I didn't want to completely throw it out, so I decided it made more sense to revisit and tweak lighting and set dressing within UE4, and start any UE5 projects from scratch. I have certainly grown a lot in the last 4 plus years, so I was able to add a little bit of what I had learned in the last few years.

The intent going into this project when I first created it was to use Megascans to setdress a serene temple with minimal if any modeling of my own. With more of a focus on worldbuilding and setdressing, I came up with some mental rules on how each plant I chose would grow, where it wouldn't, and really rooting the main temple into the landscape with debris and other assets. Apart from creating combo models of Megascans that were a little too open backed for my taste, and creating a tree from a collection of Megascans branches and a material adjusted trunk base, the bulk of the work was done solely in Unreal 4. I did do significant tweaking to the base materials to bring assets from entirely different Megascans biomes much closer to each other, as well as add functions for vertex painting and on the fly editing.

I also made some VERY simple falling cherry blossom particles to make screenshots easier and to add a little bit of zing.