TerraForge
Uku Renek Kronbergs
A graphics-focused Unreal Engine 5.7 environment/game demo with dynamic day–night lighting, ambient soundscape + river audio that reacts to proximity/placement, procedurally generated forest (PCG) with forest removal splines and volumes and much more. Development was restarted from scratch and shifted from C++ to Blueprints to iterate faster. Many experimental features were used like Nanite Foliage, Water plugin and more. Also non-experimental features were implemented like auto-exposure, upscalers and frame generation techniques (FSR4, DLSS4 - couldn't test it). Also added input delay reducers (AMD Antilag 2, Nvidia Reflex 2). The project's peformance got improved a lot compared to earlier versions by tuning the graphics settings, implementing view distance limit and more. I got it running at about 100fps on RX 9060 XT (16GB) with FSR4 frame generation and FSR4 upscaling (Balanced preset, upscaled from 1990x960p to 3440x1440p). Its a far shot from well optimized demo, but a big amount of newer games rely on these techniques to make their game run well enough.
GitHub: https://github.com/UkuRenekKronbergs/TerraForge-Procedural-World-Generator
Latest project files: https://cgvrgit.ulno.net/ukurene/TerraForge
Final release build: https://github.com/UkuRenekKronbergs/TerraForge-Procedural-World-Generator/releases/tag/Release
Video:
I wanted to make the terrain myself but opted for StampIT! Collection - FREE Examples heightmap. I tested extensively Maticorp 16/32 Bit Heightmap Generator but I didn't get the wished results with it. I used this heightmap:
It looked like this with MW Landscape Auto Material. I tested putting the forest on the whole area of this landscape and flying around but the peformance wasn't good and the file size got very big. That's where I decided I'll only make this experience walkable because it looks a lot better too this way.
Thanks to the PCG forest and Nanite foliage there were very few objects in the project. For paths and places without tress I made splines and volumes and attached the needed blueprint to them.
PCG forest blueprint and a lot other features were made by following Unreal-X-Tutorials:
River sounds blueprint:
Initial progress:
At the start I wanted to make a flight simulator like demo where you could fly and the world was generated real time with very primitive graphics. It would have looked something like Terry Davis Flight Simulation from TempleOS . After started working on it I realized that I want it to look visually better and test out the newest Unreal Engine features. So I scrapped it and started fresh.
First release build: https://github.com/UkuRenekKronbergs/TerraForge-Procedural-World-Generator/releases/tag/Proof_of_concept