[UE4] Ivy and foliage - looking for advice/critique
I played Uncharted 4 some time ago and was blown away by the quality of foliage they did and though it’s a good time to try and up my own foliage skills. Now it’s been some time since I last did some extensive foliage work so feeling quite rusty. I tried to study how and what they did in Uncharted 4 but haven’t really found any foliage breakdown or workflows so it was up to me to try to dissect what they were doing and try to achieve similar results.
Took a lot of screenshots, stared at green walls for hours and tried to get a better grasp on how they constructed textures and models. My main goal was creating ivy texture/models and from what I gathered seems that this is their approach – flat pieces to create general shapes and textures and geometric leaves on top to give meshes volume, to feel more natural, this is kinda what I’m talking about:
With this in mind went ahead and started making my own textures, this is what I got after couple of days of working and redoing:
This is just albedo/normal but I’m also using AO and transmission/subsurface maps. This is one of the models I did, about 1k verts:
Want to get some critique and/or suggestions, I think I did alright but not exactly on the level that Naughty Dog did their foliage.
I really want to improve my foliage workflows so any input in most welcome.