Procedural Foliage in Unreal Engine 4 | UE4 Tutorial (2020)

In this UE4 tutorial we will take a look over procedural foliage in the newer versions of UE4 (4.22 and above). To be more specific, we will discuss when and why you should use procedural foliage and then we will see how we can create procedural foliage in UE4 ourselves.
It may sound hard as procedural stuff isn't the easiest thing out there, but 90% of what you need already comes with engine, so don't worry if you're not very experienced with procedural generation in UE4.

One thing to keep in mind is that, in our case, procedural foliage does not mean foliage spawned at run-time. And while that might be a bit disappointing, procedural foliage in Unreal Engine is still a great tool for organic looks.

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Music used in this video:

All content on Nitrogen is available for free. We, as a community, support completely free education available to everyone. Any support is appreciated for me to keep making content for free and improving it.

[NitrogenDev]

We recently hit 10k!!! A milestone that was once so far was finally achieved and I'm so proud of our growing community! More and cooler tutorials are going to come, so if you haven't joined this community yet, make sure to do so!
On a side note, I made some pronunciation mistakes throughout the video such as saying fifty instead of fifteen, but hopefully that wasn't confusing.
As well, this is a remake of an older video and, while I don't usually do remakes, it was request by a lot of you and the old one is a bit obsolete.

[gursimranjitsingh]

yes please make tutorials for this topic as deep as you can

[theyori]

Hey I know this video is almost 2 years by now, but it is still amazing! Doing my exam project in Unreal and I am the level designer in the group. I thought the procedural generated forest I had to make was going to be a pain, but instead I ended having a blast using procedural foliage tool. I was worries when I first heard about the tool that it was very specific meshes you could use, but Works great with the polygon assets I bought for the project! Again, thanks for the quick and easy starter guide :D

[Boncitoe]

the wind blowing in the grass is so satisfying lol

[maxm.]

Very nice tutorial, I really like the way you explain stuff, not too fast and not too slow :)

[nige]

Great tutorial do you have a tutorial like this but for grass placement?

[ViralKiller]

is it possible to add some "smoothing" onto the flat polygons for the leaves, to make them more bendy..something like sub-d....branches too....I feel the thing that breaks photorealism is jagged polygony branches and leaves that are clearly mapped onto a square polygon

[lebenin]

There's really great UE stuff on your channel. I'm learning alot thanks to you. No wonder you will reach 20k subs soon. #UnrealEngine #Realtime

[BuildBeach]

Thank you! Your style of teaching is perfect. Do you have a 4.26 tutorial on how to efficiently set up the paint terrain tool? Say for items coming from Megascans? All the best...

[chriscranston]

I realise this is an old video, but consider me subscribed, liked and probably patreoned once i've looked through a few more, there's not may tutorials of this quality for landscape.
Definitely make more tutotials like this.

Are the tree's you used from an asset pack? Or did you make them ?

[deryters]

This is why UE4 is superior over unity. Much more available tools! Great video as always friend!

[ereaUA]

Hello! Thank you for the tutorial!

How did you do your grass in the example? Was it with procedural spawn too? or just draw in foliage mode?

[krzysztofmalinowski]

VERY, very useful video!!! Thank you very much <3

[ModelWhatYouSee]

Hey Nitrogen! Great tutorial. Do you know how to fix the issue of shadows turning off on procedural foliage that is far away from camera? I've tried everything I can think of and it's still doing it. Thanks for any help!

[firstgamerable]

How do I enable collision on the Foliage? I tried checking if it has the "BlockAll" options but no luck.

[conliviu]

Can you make a lumberjack in UE4? That forest is so alone...:)) Another job well done!

[WondrousSky]

I have ran into an issue with Procedural foliage spawning. I have set up the foliage types to spawn on only certain landscape layers however it refuses to spawn anything at all. It appears to be because we have the map split up into streaming proxy’s? I tested the same set up on a simple landscape and it works fine. Am I missing somthing?

[tmmegaman]

Unable to spawn instances. Ensure a large enough surface exists within the volume. Can anybody help me to solve this problem?

[yantingye]

hi, every time I put Procedural Foliage Spawner in level, it crash in UE4

[danielfavini]

very informative, thank you for sharing. quick question, performance wise, is this more efficient than using the regular foliage paint tools? how about the impact on memory?