3D Class Week 16: Creating An Environment Part 04 (Vegetation)

I've continued to rework my environment for 3D class and added vegetation now. Vegetation has been something that has always intimidated me and I was unsure of how to approach it...in the end it ended up being much simpler than I thought.

Since my environment is a snowy cave/mountain side I decided to create brown, grass and evergreen trees.

I started with creating planes for my grass and using Maya's Paint Effects to generate my grass. I rendered that as a targa so that it already gave me an alpha channel to work with.

Grass generated in Paint Effects:

The textures I created with it:

The model in Maya with the textures applied:

I also vertex painted the mesh so that the bases wouldn't move when I applied motion in the material:

After that I decided to create a pine tree. Below's the textures:

And here's the mesh in Maya:

After that I brought them all into UE4 and created the materials for the foliage so that it is two sided and has subsurface:

I also brought in a mountain I generated in World Machine in class to use in the background to give my environment more depth:

My final shots: