About half a year ago I set myself the task to reproduce the real place as detailed and accurate as possible using photogrammetry and UE. The object of scanning was the Baryatinskys' estate near Batumi, Georgia. In front of you is a fully scanned environment directly from this place, including vegetation. The manor was captured in the period from the end of winter to the end of spring 2024, the vegetation and surroundings - late spring, early summer. Now anyone can take a virtual walk around the place.

The main asset of the product is the mansion itself, which I tried to reproduce as accurately as possible, including the interior rooms. Of course, for optimization purposes, some details had to be neglected. The vegetation around the mansion serves as an auxiliary function and is not the main asset of the product. The forest is a background and is not detailed. In the future, I will probably make a separate product with vegetation, where I will pay more attention to it. Nevertheless, the product contains a significant amount of vegetation such as trees, shrubs, palm trees, banana palms and many types of small vegetation. The whole set of vegetation is optimized and ready to play. The interior of the estate is filled with vegetation procedurally, with the ability to quickly edit the location of paths, blocking volumes and so on. Some vegetation groups are placed manually, for better visual consistency.

The "Subtropical Mansion" level is for dynamic lighting only. All assets have lightmaps, but artifacts may appear when lighting is baked in. To build lighting in the "Subtropical Mansion" level and bake lighting maps, you may need significant computing power, due to the large number of vegetation assets.

disclaimer

The PCG Plugin is activated and is required for optimal functionality of the project vegetation

Also, all “static mesh” in all PCG graphs should have shadow options enabled at your discretion, as they are disabled in the product for more optimal level loading.

Important: Assets that make up this product are not universal or modular. The shapes and specifications of some assemblies may be completely useless for some other task, unless you redesign them. Everything and absolutely everything in this product is designed just for this product and the demo level in it!

The "Subtropical mansion" product only implements suny lighting, and the images with overcast lighting are demo images.

Short overview video

Performance:

The level was tested at HIGH graphics settings on the following configurations:

1) PC Ryzen 5950x, RAM 64 Gb ddr4 3200 Mhz, RTX 3060 12Gb, 4k

2) Laptop i7 12700H, RAM 32 Gb ddr5 4800 Mhz, RTX 3070 ti, FHD, 4k

In the first case I got 20-40 FPS in the editor and 35-45 FPS in the packaged game.

In the second case: 20-45 FPS in editor, 35-45 FPS in packed game at 4k resolution and 45-65 FPS in editor and 65-75 FPS in packed game at FHD resolution.

Video card performance in both cases is about the same, RAM utilization is about 10-15 Gb.

The most resource-intensive assets are vegetation assets and their number on the scene. Despite the use of procedural PCG vegetation arrangement system with HISM, there are a large number of uniquely arranged vegetation assets on the scene to improve the visual component. I tried to approach the optimization as responsibly as possible and did a lot of work in this direction, although the assets and level structure could be subject to much more optimization without losing visual quality. At the moment the product aims to be as useful as possible for different tasks: it can be cinematic clips, as close as possible plans for shooting, as well as game locations. For example, if you reduce texture resolution by one value, the entire scene will take less than 2 GB of video memory, with the same visual quality. 

HDR map from PolyHaven