Creating Complex Vegetation & Foliage for Games

Let Peyton Varney, Environment Texture Artist at Naughty Dog, guide you through the process of pushing vegetation in your game environments to the next level. Following on from Peyton’s "Introduction to Creating Game-Ready Foliage" workshop, this intermediate-level tutorial takes a deeper dive into foliage creation. Discover how to create a variety of grass and tree assets for your scene and learn how to place them in your environments for realistic results.

Follow Peyton as he works through the process of reviewing collected references, blocking out a scene, and creating the trunk and branches of his trees. You’ll see how to place your cards — that you will individually create by hand — efficiently in your environment. The workshop also covers grass creation and how to set up a group of grass assets that offer a strong amount of variation and an organic quality to your scenes. Once you have created all of your foliage assets, you will go into the workflow of proper placement in Unreal Engine and learn how to push your scenes further.

Basic knowledge of vegetation creation is suggested as this tutorial focuses on the creation process of trees and grass and the workflow of how to get more out of your vegetation assets. At the end of this tutorial, you will have a strong understanding of how to push your foliage to the next level, and have a variety of techniques to help you set up different grass and tree assets to vary up your scenes. You’ll also have the confidence to place your assets to achieve the natural and realistic results that audiences expect.

Peyton’s scene template is included as a downloadable project file with this workshop.