PCG Procedural Mushroom Forest

This project was one of my first large-scale experiments with Unreal Engine’s Procedural Content Generation framework, created while studying the Electric Dreams Sample Project. The goal was to build a fully procedural forest ecosystem that could adapt to designer input while maintaining strong visual cohesion and performance across a large World Partition level.
Rather than hand-placing foliage, paths, and set dressing, I built a PCG system that interprets spline data for rivers, lakes, paths, and exclusion zones, then generates a stylized mushroom forest that respects those constraints automatically. The scene uses Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes (HISM) and World Partition awareness to support large-scale generation without sacrificing runtime performance.
A key focus of this project was transforming realistic Megascans assets into a dreamlike environment. I authored custom material modifications that remap color, introduce controlled emissive glow, and create a cohesive visual language across otherwise photoreal assets. Small glowing mushrooms are also procedurally spawned along paths to create readable traversal routes in darker environments.
Later, I extended the system to support underwater reed generation inside lakes. Reeds automatically scale based on water depth so that their tips always reach the surface — a small detail that added a surprising amount of environmental believability while remaining fully procedural.
This project became an early foundation for many of the procedural philosophies and tooling approaches I use today: spline-aware generation, ecosystem-level thinking, material-driven stylization, and scalable instancing across large worlds.