Thanks to everyone, I'll try xfrog - it has free trial and learn a bit about steedtreee and megascans... I use maya and looking forward to see blender 2.8 to use it by the way.
Speedtree for UE4 starts at 20 bucks a month. That really isn't so much. You can also download trial / evaluation versions to see if it fits your need. As far as I know, there isn't a student version. I would say the cinema version is the "universal" version but that expensive, yeah :D Honestly, the best thing to do is to…