One of my larger projects on Wayfinder involves curating and improving the foliage material system. With so many different types of plants and biomes, we needed robust material setups that could handle the varied foliage types (trees, grasses, shrubs, groundcover, etc) while not putting undue stress on performance while having thousands of these actors rendered at any given time. Additionally, I wanted to include as much dynamic interaction as possible to help the levels feel alive and responsive to player movement. This was largely done with a combination of global parameters driving material behaviors (such as setting up a global wind system separate from Unreal's speedtree wind) as well as extensive use of PivotPainter baked information to modify foliage movement at each hierarchical level, for a more natural interaction than simply using the base asset pivot.
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In addition to the foliage interactions, I also set up a camera-based dither fade to cull out larger foliage assets that would otherwise obscure the camera. Later I expanded this system to include non-foliage static meshes as well. This utilizes a fairly straightforward check of the camera vector against the foliage and player positions, and flexible parameters to adjust the angle at which the fade begins and how long it takes to fully fade, as well as shift the placement of the dither mask itself, allowing it to be adjusted based on object rotation and transform for assets with pivots that don't line up in expected locations (ex: pivots offset from the mesh)
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For much of this, I worked closely with Romain Durand (who made the majority of our foliage's 3d and 2d assets, and their initial material setups) to figure out what behaviors and visual options we wanted for the different foliage families, and where to compromise for performance's sake. He doesn't even (I think) hold it against me for the one day I turned all the wood pink.
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Additional props, worldbuilding, and lighting shown were created through a combination of all of our fantastic artists, including Jesse Carpenter, John Stamos, Vincent Gros, Ranko Prozo, Romain Durand, Jasmin Hebezai-Fekri, and Tristan Faure. Concepts were primarily done by Baldi Konijin, Virginia Critchfield, Philip Karlov, Ludo Lullabi. Additional art assets were created by Dragonfly Studio, GFactory, and Vsquad.
https://www.artstation.com/romaindurand
https://www.artstation.com/jessecarpenter
https://www.artstation.com/jstamos
https://www.artstation.com/vincentgros
https://www.artstation.com/rankoprozo
https://www.artstation.com/curlscurly
https://www.artstation.com/fauretristan
https://www.artstation.com/baldi-konijn
https://www.artstation.com/ludolullabi
https://www.artstation.com/vsquadstudio
Foliage movement test corner set up by Romain Durand
All the shiny assets made by Romain
Me, stealing Romain's test levels, again. Pine tree movement (they were monsters to set up)
Player interaction (foliage test level set up by Romain Durand)
Player interaction (foliage test level set up by Romain Durand)
Camera fade (foliage test level set up by Romain Durand)
Global wind controls for strength and direction (foliage test level set up by Romain Durand)