Answered: Some general Megascans questions

jordank95

I notice the industry using a lot of Megascans these days. After spending some time searching the site, I notice theres a lot of separate leaves from trees and not full branches. To make trees using Megascans and Speedtree, are people just grabbing the leaves and assembling them in into a custom branch in photoshop and then importing into Speedtree?

As for decals...I notice Megascans has a ton of decals as well. Most things you would just model out like wood planks or pieces of garbage. Isn't it better to just model these out? Or is it fine to just have these on a decal with displacement? That just seems like a lot of polys when it can just be modeled. 

Thanks for the help guys.

Synaesthesia

I create custom geo in Max around the leaf atlases and use them as leaf cards in SpeedTree. In regards to wood planks or garbage, it's all dependent on your use-case. Flat decals can work well with normals driving the surface definition, but so can adding geo to a custom decal to provide a bit more depth. It really all depends on what you're trying to get out of the surface.