I first created my grass texture a mud texture and a merge texture grass to mud UDK is great at blending textures but wanted an edging texture which I could lay pebbles etc on later. I then creted a grass blade texture and object to be used as a foliage layer allowing me to paint on the grass where needed.
I also added a sky dome using a panoramic photo from
http://www.cgtextures.com/index.php edited in photoshop and mapped to a hemisphere. This uses emisive lighting to give a nice starting point to the lighting. I also added fog to get the mood of the scene taking a break from modelling and keeping things interesting.
I also had some problems with shadows on the grass but lighting it independently of the scene and turning shadows off sorted it ..
When creating the trees I started with speedtree to see the kind of results I could achieve. It was very fast and convenient but slowed my machine it had nice animations but also couldn't control the blending of texture at base of trunk as trunk texture was tiled looked pretty good though.
Using what I learned from Speed tree I constructed my own fantasy tree from some warhammer Fantasy reference first creating the trunk, mushrooms and surface detail and then unwrapped.
Then I created a separate cross plane object for the small branches and applied an alpha texture which was on a separate smaller 512 texture sheet.
Next I tested in unreal to see the scale and how the textures were working..
After getting the grass in I decided to add more dacal objects first a kind of Hero Decal object with the Toadstool.
These were created in a small group as they seemed to grow like this and seemed to make sense the size and rotation could be varied for each object in UDK.
Then to add some colour and variationn I added flowers and changed the Alpha on one of the grass objects. this was a quick fix but added a lot of detail making the scene more natural. I think adding a slight transparancy to the end of the grass material may soften it further. Also I think bushes and brambles need to be added to give the ground a more wild feel and give more variation to the ground.
I also added a sky dome using a panoramic photo from http://www.cgtextures.com/index.php edited in photoshop and mapped to a hemisphere. This uses emisive lighting to give a nice starting point to the lighting. I also added fog to get the mood of the scene taking a break from modelling and keeping things interesting.
Using what I learned from Speed tree I constructed my own fantasy tree from some warhammer Fantasy reference first creating the trunk, mushrooms and surface detail and then unwrapped. 
After getting the grass in I decided to add more dacal objects first a kind of Hero Decal object with the Toadstool. 
These were created in a small group as they seemed to grow like this and seemed to make sense the size and rotation could be varied for each object in UDK.
