Amazing Fungi , Mushrooms in Unreal Engine 5

After watching a documentary about fungi and mushrooms , I got fascinated by the shapes, forms and colors that they can manifest in.
I really wanted to recreate some cool types of mushrooms in a game, as usually mushrooms are either super stylized cartoony or just a few common types if realistic.
I used that as an excuse to work with UE5 and nanite exclusively. Creating all the mushrooms with actual geometry and numbers that couldn't be possible on an old gen machine for this type of asset.
This was a challange in adjusting my usual pipeline as it isn't suited for such large poly objects very well.
Something that most people omit when talking nanite , is how difficult is to actually work with UV's if the object is not photogrammetry.
This took some adjustment and a combination of houdini, max and some zbrush magic to get it to a neat point. Even then I can see non organic shapes being incredibly difficult to work with when your engine asset is 300-500k poly.

Still the results are cool and nanite, produces some amazing results.
The scene is also using Lumen of course , and the absence of light baking is definitely welcomed.

All in all when researching I found hundreds of absolutely alien looking mushrooms and fungi, and this is just a scratch of what I really wanted to make.
All the assets are made by me in either zbrush or blender. Textures are substance designer, painter for the mushrooms.
The materials where made by, the more interesting one being the mushrooms itself with some SSS and mask maps to create variations.
Also worked on a new version of the terrain material I usually use , with auto slope, and modular structure so that I can daisy chain multiple auto layers together.
The scene itself is a small affair inspired by Hannibal tv series episode. I changed up and combine two or three assets with layers, so they don't all cluster the scene completely.

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