I created this environment in Unreal Engine 4 for real time use within a photorealistic game. I did this project to get a better understanding of creating realistic and dynamic environments within UE4. The assets that I created for this environment were modelled and sculpted without snow on and the snow material and depth was added using visual scripting. I did this because I wanted to assets to be procedural and still fit in to the environment, and baking the snow into the material in Substance painter would've limited my assets to one axis. I could also control the height of the snow as well as the coverage percent as shown to the right.

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I also added a variable into all of my plant-like materials using a collection parameter that allowed me to manually control the wind within my level, and have it effect the strength on all of the assets to make everything consistent with one another. This is also shown to the right. 

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When creating my assets too, I wanted to create some assets such as piles of snow or rocks to scatter around the environment in order to break it up and hide seams. Some of rock piles and rocks used are gathered from Megascans combined with my snow material to match the environment. When added to the environment, the seam between the landscape and asset seamed too harsh and unrealistic which forced me to add a dither node into my master material that could be triggered and customized using parameters and switches within the instance. The dither is shown on the video to the right and can be customized to match the asset as well as the position it is in the level.

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I am so happy with the outcome of this project and believe that I have learnt so much about creating realistic environments within UE4 which I shall utilise in future projects.