Norway Spruce Forest, Unreal 5 and 4

Here is my latest side project in Unreal - a kit of Norway Spruce trees, and of course an environment to go with it.

This is my second project working fully with Unreal 5 , but my first one working on backwards compatibility with Unreal 4.
The same scene going from 4.26 to 5.1 .
This was an interesting exercise as it highlighted the differences in rendering between UE4 and 5.

Unreal 4 scene uses Baked Lighting and volumetric lightmaps , Unreal 5 goes fully Lumen , using hardware raytracing.
Everything else is completely the same , textures, post process , lighting settings (unless it needs to be changed to work with the differences in lighting engines)
I'm definitely more impressed by the UE5 scene with much sharper detail thanks to the superior temporal solution, more realistic tones and lighting came as a bit of a surprise.
Still there is something to be said for the Unreal4 scene , with its more pastel colours and overall slightly more stylized look.
The generational leap is apparent and not only due to more triangles and realtime GI.

On the more general side - again all textures models and everything basically in this scene is made by me.
Shaders I worked on for the Oak Forest turned out robust enough to work almost entirely unchanged for the spruces.

Still a few features here and there needed to be adjusted, making it even more versatile for my next project.
I also polished up some of my other shaders and tools.
My rock triplanar shader , needed some adjustments for proper normal orientation , plus stripped some unneeded features. Unified most shaders with general functions , like wetness near water/ moss(other) mask/wind.
I also streamlined further my tools for painting wind and generating LODs as I am using non speedtree methods.

Something new I did try to incorporate in my texture creation was the use of AI generation. Used some local stable diffusion to fix up tiling , create some base textures that I scattered on top and used in Substance Designer. As one of the tools in the toolbag it does pretty good. Not worth it yet to generate complete textures yet, for me at least. I wanted to keep the slight stylization , and I just enjoy creating everything in designer. Still a good addition to the suite of tools non the less.

Overall fun project to get into.
Next its time to get nanite foliage for a spin.

You can find the project here:
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/cc105dd192b9448fb2d6febac41469d4