Recreating the Eras Tour in Unreal Engine 5.4 - Dev Diary #5 🌿✨ Sofia is a very green city, so realistic tree coverage became essential - but it also instantly became the heaviest part of the scene. I started by using Unreal Engine’s automatic LOD system to aggressively reduce triangle count on all foliage. I also made the trees less dense by adjusting seed distribution inside the Procedural Foliage Spawner, and used culling distance to hide geometry outside the playable space. The biggest performance win came from disabling foliage shadows. I compensated for that by leaning into the ambient evening lighting of the scene - meaning the environment still feels atmospheric without the heavy shadow cost. The goal wasn’t photoreal forest simulation - it was capturing the atmosphere of Sofia while keeping the performance playable on my GTX 1080. Next dev diary: stage design and crowd integration @Taylor Swift @Taylor Nation @Unreal Engine #solodev #devdiary #taylorswifterastour