FMP: Analysing UDK assets

I've spent a little time looking at the UDK assets - in particular the foliage showcase level - This level is pretty nice and has assets with more fidelity than what I have made so far, and is a logical goal in standards.

The level I am looking for asset reference is the "Foliage Map".  I remember looking at this earlier in the course - This time round I actually understand some of it and it all seems to make more sense.  This is a good standard to aim for, and is above what it seems was the standard when the DMUGA course was initiated, with more higher budgets.

Here is a UDK supplied map that should be at C:\UDK\UDK-2013-07\UDKGame\Content\Maps\Showcases

Here are some of my favorite assets from the sample UDK level

Being a foliage map it showcases moving or wind driven foliage that sways, particle effects and a waterfall among other things.  I'm basically going to emulate the level of detail and techniques used from looking at the assets.  My project is a lot larger though and I seriously doubt I can pack as much dense quality in as they have here.

Among the most interesting assets are the materials - I now understand a bit about how to create materials and can borrow some ideas they use.  One is to have a "moss?" parameter which will add a tiling moss texture on the current one.

Another interesting asset is THE rock - they use one rock to create all the formations.  This is a typical technique used, but this is a great example.  Giving nearly 8k tris for a single rock I thought would be high, but not here.  It's worth remembering that the normal map has a "tiled normal" or "details normal", which is a simple tiling rock normal map over the top of the standard normal map.  This layering of two normal maps is pretty common.  The topology on rocks tends to be crap, even this one looks like someone used the pro-optimizer modifier, leaving some horribly acute angles in topology.   Something else odd about the rock is that the geometry has been opened along the map seam - I believe this is to do with the horrible map seams in UDK, this is a way around it

Here the statue has horrible seams on the UVs, which are also in the geometry - Yet not visible seams in UDK

I think I have sussed out their workflow a little.  Using Ubververt count I can see their assets are 100% ifficient - Even though they have splits in the geometry which is match on the UVs.  Using Textools I can emulate this by auto-smoothing the faces then creating UV islands by smoothing group.  After this each of the vert's needs to be unified to an average.  In my mind this doesn't seem like a logical way to create assets, in is probably a way around technical issues - Probably utilising scripts to automate their processes.

Personally I don't like cutting up my models - seems like ruining them, so I will fall back with what I already know