Environnement foliage creation practices

I'm currently working on a river forest scene in UE4 for my portfolio/study /practice and I've gotten to the point where I want to start working on some of the foliage. I've have seen multiple ways for going about creating foliage and I wanted to ask here what is the most commonly used method professionally, or moreover, which workflow should I aim to demonstrate that I can do in my portfolio?

I'm currently hesitating between modeling sculpting and painting branches for foliage cards and using images to make the cards (google image or megascans). 
The point of the scene is to look more or less photorealistic but not to an extreme extent. For trees, I was thinking of modeling the base and applying a tileable bark made in substance. 

Thanks for taking the time to read if anything is unclear please let me know