Trees and Saw Palmettos

 Lately I've created a few variations of the oak trees and some saw palmettos.

 

 

Saw palmetto sculpt and material atlas

To make the trees, I tried a new technique where I converted the cards to cutout geometry and placed them on a trunk mesh with PCG. From what I understand, Nanite and Lumen can render opaque geometry more efficiently than masked materials. This should also save a bit of memory because these few meshes are repeated to create the canopy rather than using a bunch of unique geometry within a single static mesh.

 

Canopy meshes

 

The canopy meshes use geometry instead of an opacity mask.

The branches and epiphytes are placed on the trunk as instanced meshes through PCG.

I created sockets in the trunk mesh to hand place some of the foliage, such as the Spanish moss and orchids.

The ferns are automatically placed anywhere moss is painted on the tree.

The points for each tree are saved to data assets which are then duplicated throughout the level at runtime.

One of the main shots with the new trees and saw palmettos.

Now that I've got the shots filled in with the new foliage, I'm going to start on the bridge next.