Electric Dreams | UE5 GDC 2023
I had the absolute pleasure of working on this year's GDC UE5 tech demo. As the project was located in the jungle with dense vegetation, I worked on optimizing and reworking existing assets. Further some new tech and functionality had to be added in order to fit plants and trees in this ecosystem. Having a huge library of vegetation based functions that I already implemented in the past did really help speeding up the work.
In this artwork I would like to give you an impression of the work of a technical artist and show you some of many functions that I have been implementing for this demo.
It was such a lovely time working with each and everybody of you. Below are the names of the developers I work closely with.
Jakob Keudel
Isac Crafoord
Wiktor Ohman
Daniel Woje
Marien Elalaoui
Galen Davis
Mathew O'Halloran
Adam Rosengren
Jean-Sebastien Guay
The sample is available for download now, check it out here: https://unrealengine.com/marketplace/product/electric-dreams-env
The trees used in the demo are the European Hornbeam pack. These had to be fitted in the jungle look. For this I added a lichen function to add more randomness to the very smooth, but botanically correct bark of a hornbeam tree. You have several different
To have the car interact with the placed vegetation we ended up rigging/skinning the plants and placing them via physical actors in the world. This implementation did result in the best quality of vegetation interaction. Shader based approaches via WPO ha
For plants with a simple structure, you only had to use one to two bones per main branch.
With this plant you had up to 3 levels or hierarchy. At this point it got a bit difficult to rig and skin the plant.
Unfortunately these did not make it in the demo. Also important to notice that no plant was harmed during development.