Vegetation | Modeling & Setup
I approached modeling trees the same way I do in realistic workflows – with attention to the details, focusing on dead branches, peeling bark, and tiny twigs placed near the base of the trunk, without introducing too much noise. The leaves – stylized as brushstrokes – were mostly placed procedurally: large strokes at the base of the branch and smaller ones a bit further away. I also added a layer of leaves floating in the air, disconnected from the rest and breaking up the silhouette a bit. I manually trimmed some leaves on the lower branches for a more polished look.
To fluff them up, I created a blobby shell in Blender around the canopies for each deciduous tree to project normals onto the foliage. Lastly, I set up and baked AO into vertex colors, which is then used later in the UE material, multiplied by a blocky noise, to drive a gradient from bright yellow to orange and to influence the subsurface scattering settings.
All custom grasses were assembled in SpeedTree as well. The coloration process for some of those was driven by the UE landscape layer info.
