Tileable materials I used in my scene, all made from scratch in Substance Designer.

Water has waves made by panning textures with normals in different directions, and ripples made with distance fields. Waterfall is a Niagara system with a few emitters with a mesh renderer using a waterfall mesh and a circular mesh for ripples.

Process of how the environment has been changing from the initial blockout to its final form

References I gathered for this project (+ quick top down sketch of the general layout of the environment); The references were divided into 3 categories: from real life (like Shiraito Falls), from game (Genshin Impact), and artworks that inspired me.

For rocks, I first blocked out the shapes in the engine, then exported them to ZBrush, where I sculpted them into rocks, made low poly by decimating it, fixed UVs in Maya and textured in Painter, where I baked high poly and made a smart material for rocks

To make grass (foliage) blend with the landscape it was on, I used Runtime Virtual Texture. Landscape actor drew its base colour into it, which then grass material was picking up. The result was that the foliage grass was adapting to material underneath.

Material graph for bark, other graphs had a similar structure, just different height and adjusted parameters. I also exposed a few parameters, so I could adjust the material in UE5 with Substance Plugin.