UE5 | Ninety Days | Lonely Tree

This is one of the Environments created for Quixel's 'Ninety Days' project, during which each individual artist in our team was tasked with completing as many different environment as possible, all in a timespan of 90 days.

Take a look at the complete "Ninety Days" release right here: https://youtu.be/ca2ME4Wy0eM

This was the first scene I made for the project. It's kind of inspired by the oak tree in Shawshank Redemption, but with an alder tree instead of oak tree. And without Morgan Freeman and the small box of money.
There is something I really like about having an endless grassy field like this. One important thing for me was that I really wanted to make the grass feel really dense, which it is. The issue then is that the scene becomes hell to work with since the dense grass on such a vast distance just tanks the performance and makes the MRQ render times super slow. Luckily for me, on that distance you just need abstract noise to make things look legit.
So the "proper" grass just covers a really small area actually. The rest is foliage without any shadows and after that just a surface texture where I turned the normal map intensity waaaay up. Its crazy what things you can get away with :D

Everything for 'Ninety Days' was created using the Epic Games and Quixel Ecosystem, meaning we used Megascans, Metahumans, Sketchfab and the Epic Marketplace.

A massively heartfelt thankyou to the amazing people I get to work alongside with:
https://www.artstation.com/disting
https://www.artstation.com/sagadesign
https://www.artstation.com/alectucker
https://www.artstation.com/danwoje
https://www.artstation.com/jackm
https://www.artstation.com/corshmell
https://www.artstation.com/mattoztalay