Norway Spruce

This is my latest asset pack that I just released on Unreals FAB Marketplace.

After doing the Nordic Conifer Biome a few years ago, I felt that while I was very happy with the end result, it was compromised due to the sheer size of it and the level of optimization needed led to some visual compromise.
I was also in my ”procedural phase” when doing it, and me wanting to keep everything as a one click setup, led to some unwanted complexity when people tried to use it in their own scenes.

I felt an itch unscratched and wanted to push the up close visual fidelity further, while still keeping things optimized enough to run in a current gen game.

The original dream many years ago was always to make this into a VR experience, and for that you need it to feel real at an arms length!

So this is how this all came to be, and also the reason why it’s a separate thing and not just an update of the old asset pack. Different goals.

So with the things I have learned in these last few years, using some new techniques and workflows, I came up with this.
A lot of time was spent remaking pretty much everything from scratch, developing everything to serve as a base for future biomes and asset packs, so that I have a solid foundation to keep everything consistent across future content.

In that sense, the purpose of this was two fold, both scratching a lingering itch and serving as a development platform for my own future asset packs.

I am pretty happy with the results of this, and I feel I have achieved what I set out to do, create something that not only looks good at a glance, but also holds up to close scrutiny.

As a part of this project I also developed my own "wind shader". I have worked with Unreals Pivot Painter for many years now, and after the initial "wow each branch has its own rotation" reaction had worn off, I felt that while it was very cool, the end result was often not to my liking. It always felt a bit stiff and rigid in it's movement.
It was also pretty annoying to work with, error prone and hard to iterate on quickly, something that is pretty important in my workflow.

So I tried setting up my own thing, that is completely automatic, no pivots to paint and no need for any painstakingly painted vertex colors. It is completely based on the size and bounding volume of the object, so it adapts to the size of the mesh, from the smallest grass to the tallest tree, and there is no need to do any setup what so ever.
This has saved me so much time in my asset creation and is something I hope will be of great help in the future. While perhaps not as physically accurate as a good PivotPainter Setup, I think it looks "good enough", and with the time I save on setup for every asset created, I think its worth the tradeoff. The wind in action can be seen in the video at the top!

This pack is available now on FAB, everything used to create these scenes/images is included in the pack.
https://www.fab.com/listings/cd119d0e-ec1c-4071-be37-90d5371fa3c6