A week ago I made a post regarding a graphic update asking for some feedback for the environment in my demo. Thought Id share some of the things I did to elevate the scene while maintain a great fps because as a solo dev I was riding the struggle bus and maybe someone  in my shoes could learn from what helped me the most regarding environment building for open worlds. Both pictures are screenshots of in game - its not a cinematic level sequencer or anything. Just a First person view. I canned the 3rd person.

the elephant in the room, cohesion and geographically correction. I tried to make a pretty scene without learning geography. (who would have thought lol) I spent the past week looking at google maps in Europe seeing how things work. How trails dip a little lower roughly an inch than the rest of the terrain due to walking, How trees fight for the sun in mountain peeks, why water streams exist, etc. etc. Needless to say I'm getting a great science (and history lesson).

another trick that improved my work flow greatly: Build terrain > ask how does water / rain reaction impact my terrain > How do the trees react to the flow of water. Once I learned this concept it all just kind of clicked. Villages now make sense, valleys make sense, forests make sense, foliage makes sense. I imagined rain falling down the cliffs, sculpted out some paths where the water would meet, now I have streams, those streams converge to a river. Villages near rivers / streams. It sounds so simple saying it, but just something I never thought about.

This is more for the UE5 Users, you can skip this part. Lighting and shadows. Instead of properly optimizing shadows I took the easy way out and disabled dynamic lighting. The amount of depth the shadows make in the foreground and background, elevated my level tremendously all while maintaining roughly 120+ FPS in editor / play. That's without HLOD optimization as well since I had to rebuild. look into cascading and dynamic shadow distance and contact shadows. That's what gives the shadow that punch from far away. Lower the cascade depending on your FPS. Turn off shadows for foliage that isn't necessary, like small flowers. If you are struggling for FPS, I found turning off dynamic shadows on the grass for the PCG, but than adding the same grass to the foliage paint and adding dynamic shadows and painting sporadically to give the illusion without suffering performance.

Anyway, just a quick dev update and some tricks for anyone using UE5. It can be a pain to optimize but man it pays off. As always I would love feedback to always improve, none of it goes un noticed.

Before and After + tips