Creating plants and vegetation

sun_smasher

I'm looking at making fully PBR plants, but the texture creation part has me stumped. I made some herbs as a test run, and I know it was horribly inefficient. Are there any good tutorials out there that cover making full plants (not grass or trees, I'm talking like ferns or rubber plants here) in a PBR workflow like what you see now in video games? I've gone through the tutorials on this site already and none of them have fully answered my questions. 

How I do it now is I make a zbrush of a leaf, stem, any other part the plant might have. Then I texture a low poly version of these in Substance painter, and then assemble the plant in 3ds max, and then render the diffuse, rgs, etc out separately and put these on a sheet with photoshop. I feel like I'm missing something on a faster way to do it. I've tried speed tree, and yes it's great for some things, but it doesn't help a lot when I'm making something more complex.

Froyok

If we take the example of a tree, it's mainly composed of two things : the bark texture for the trunk, and the leaves.
These kind of textures have covered by a lot of artists already, so you should be able to find some tutorials, such as : 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RwdPIG8SQk

Kevin Albers

I'm not sure you are missing out on anything major. For really high-end foliage, there is a trend these days to model things out in high poly form and bake them down, like many other types of assets (e.g. character stuff). This can take a lot of time, compared to old-school methods that rely more on grabbing stuff from photos for textures.

On the bright side, if you are modeling things out, after a while you can have a good sized library that is more re-usable than things like photos. You can tweak an reuse leaf models, substances for bark etc, which saves a lot of time once you have an OK sized library.

So, if you just need to do a few plants, it may be time-intensive. If you are going to do a ton of them, focus on keeping source models flexible, by using parametric objects in Max (lofts etc), tri-planar mapped basic substances, and similar approaches, with an eye to modifying and reusing the core stuff later on.