Optimized Rocks asset pack available on the Marketplace!

I present to you, the Optimized Rocks asset pack!:

Available for purchase here: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/optimized-rocks

Some personal notes: I had taken great pains to create some beautiful and highly optimized rocks for my game, when the prospect of selling them was presented to me, prudence dictated I moved toward that end post haste. So I prepared them by fixing various details needing polish, cleaning up UVs, fixing normals etc., and even upgrading them by including a new distance fading normal material!

Submitting the pack was daunting, as I had heard Epic could take up to a month or more to assess submissions (and indeed I experienced that very time frame), also the thought of rejection was a bit stressful, but after 4 re-submission requests to correct various technical aspects and obscure guidelines (naming conventions and other minor things), it was accepted! For posterity I want to mention the road was not an easy one. Each iteration came at the cost of more time waiting for a word from Epic, but having now become a veteran of the process I understand the reason for Epic's stringent adherence to guidelines and agree with it. A comforting sense of accomplishment is awarded for the efforts!

Grass: Nature's Carpet

What on earth would anyone do without tutorials? Of all the trial and error and tutorial taking I've done thus far, grass has to be the easiest. I've created a nice grass from scratch, first using Maya to create the geometry and UVs, Photoshop to hand paint the blades/tufts, then a nice material with wind properties in UE4. The result is quite nice, and the overdraw is not bad at all! An astute individual shared his findings online concerning overdraw, and it turns out that while more polygons alleviate overdraw, polygon rich foliage noticeably impacted frame rate negatively, while acceptable levels of overdraw did not. My only regret in hind sight is the amount of transparency on the tree branch cards, I could have trimmed them quite a bit at the cost of a few extra triangles, but as it stands the computational impact is still low.