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Courses > Environment Art

Easy Foliage for Games

By Emiel Sleegers

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Based on 22 ratings

COURSE SUMMARY

Learn how a professional environment artist works when creating easy and efficient foliage for games. You will learn how to create various types of foliage like trees, shrubs, ivy, grass, plants, and more. Next to this, you will also learn how to create foliage decals, custom leaf, and branch textures and how to place foliage in your environment.

Course Details

click-icon 11 Hours of video Content

click-icon English

click-icon Beginner

click-icon Source Files Included

click-icon English, Chinese, Spanish

COURSE TRAILER

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Gathering Resources.

As this course primarily focuses on creating foliage models, we will demonstrate how to gather various resources from platforms like MegaScans and Textures.com, including leaf and bark textures. These resources will enable us to efficiently construct our foliage elements with realistic textures.

Creating various types of small scale plants.

You will gain expertise in crafting a variety of small-scale plants such as ivy, grass, flowers, and water lilies within SpeedTree. The procedural nature of SpeedTree allows you to generate countless variations of these models once they have been created, offering flexibility and efficiency in your plant creation process.

Creating large scale foliage.

In addition to small-scale foliage, we will also demonstrate how to create larger-scale foliage, such as trees, within SpeedTree, providing a comprehensive understanding of creating various types of foliage for your environments.

Engine Setup.

In addition to creating foliage, we will also guide you on how to set it up in Unreal Engine, create custom shaders, and effectively integrate it into your environments, ensuring that your foliage is seamlessly incorporated into your projects.

Full Course Description

Easy Foliage for Games – In-Depth Tutorial Course

Learn how a professional environment artist works when creating easy and efficient foliage for games. You will learn how to create various types of foliage like trees, shrubs, ivy, grass, plants, and more. Next to this, you will also learn how to create foliage decals, custom leaf, and branch textures and how to place foliage in your environment.

SPEEDTREE, MAYA, AND UNREAL ENGINE 5

Almost all foliage will be created using Speedtree. Next to this, we will also use Maya (however you can also use Blender or Max) and we will set everything up inside Unreal Engine 5. We will also use a bit of Photoshop & Marmoset for our decals and leaf textures.

At the end of this course, you will have a deep understanding of how to create quick and efficient foliage for games. We made sure this tutorial is easy to understand and perfect if you want to quickly jump into foliage creation.

11+ HOURS!

This course contains over 11+ hours of content – You can follow along with every single step – This course has been done 100% in real-time except for the bonus content. However, we have also included the time-lapsed footage in real-time without narration.

We will start by doing our foliage planning and collecting all of our needed textures from Megascans and Textures.com. After that, we will jump right in and make our Ivy plants. We will also set up our foliage material in UE5 and balance out our textures to make our models ready for placement. After this, we will go through the process of creating various types of foliage like Grass, Shrubs, Water Lily’s, Water plants, and more.

We will then take a break from the foliage creation and go over how to create custom leaf and branch textures using photogrammetry and Speedtree. After this, we will finish this course by creating our trees and placing everything in our level. And finally, we will have some extra bonus content where you see me designing a level using the foliage we created.

SKILL LEVEL

This game art tutorial is perfect for students who have familiarity with 3d Modeling tools and Unreal Engine – Everything in this tutorial will be explained in detail. However, if you have never touched any modeling or engine tools before we recommend that you first watch an introduction tutorial of those programs (you can find many of these for free on YouTube or paid on this very website)

TOOLS USED

  • Speedtree 9
  • Maya 2022
  • Unreal Engine 5
  • Marmoset Toolbag 4
  • Photoshop

SOURCE FILES

Please note that although we will be using the tunnel scene and lake house scene you see here as an example on how to use your foliage. These scenes are not included in the source files. Your source files will of course include all save files and an unreal project with all foliage.

You will also have to import some specific Megascans textures upon first loading up your scene, however, we will explain how to do this in the tutorial.

YOUR INSTRUCTOR

Emiel Sleegers is a senior environment artist and owner of FastTrack Tutorials. He’s worked on games like The Division 2 + DLC at Ubisoft, Forza Horizon 3 at Playground Games, and as a Freelancer on multiple projects as an Environment Artist and Material Artist.

CHAPTER SORTING

There’s a total of 31 videos split into easy-to-digest chapters.
All the videos will have logical naming and are numbered to make it easy to find exactly the ones you want to follow.

SUBTITLES
Subtitles are offered for this tutorial in English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese.
Please note the subtitles are auto-generated and might not always be 100% accurate.

JOIN OUR DISCORD!
https://discord.gg/Uhj6PCjdeX

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YOUR INSTRUCTOR

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Emiel Sleegers is a Lead Environment Artist and the owner of FastTrackStudio, with over 8 years of experience in the AAA game industry. He is known for his expertise as an Environment and Material Artist, as well as his work as a tutor in the field of 3D game art. Emiel has worked for major companies such as Playground Games (Forza Horizon 3) and Ubisoft Entertainment (The Division + DLC). In addition to his work at FastTrackStudio, Emiel also creates learning content for FastTrackTutorials and provides services to clients such as Adobe, MSI, Artstation, Shutterstock, TeamLiquid, Vertex School, and others.

REVIEWS

We feel confident that you will love this course! But incase you do not believe us we will let the reviews speak for us!

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Based on 22 ratings

review-person-icon Jack Mordho Source | Artstation

Fantastic primer for Speedtree, and some valuable Unreal tips. One of my favorite things about Emiel's tutorials is that he doesn't edit out sections where things go wrong, bugs occur, etc. This gives a feeling like a senior artist is at your workstation showing you the real process, and teaching you the mindset to work through issues that may arise. Yes it adds some time, but over time learning this way has really improved my ability to troubleshoot. Quick bit for you Emiel, if you haven't tried already, when you are making branch textures like in chapter 27, try using Phyllotaxy Gen mode for the small branches and leaves, and set it to Opposite (distichous) or Alternating (distichous). These settings eliminate the need to use forces to straighten out the leaves for good baking, because it mimics specific plant behavior that already does this.

review-person-icon Maxime Tijou Source | Artstation

Very good tutorials, I learned new ways of working, optimization, and more general creation of environment! I highly recommend this course, moreover, the author articulates well and is easy to understand (it also contains Subtitles if needed)!

review-person-icon Chris Steenerson Source | Artstation

I had a foliage blind spot in my skillset and this was a fantastic introduction!

review-person-icon Yong Cheul Choi Source | Artstation

It's really useful and a great opportunity to take my skills to the next level. Thanks, can you please add a Korean translation? When I watch it in English, when I stop and watch it, an afterimage still remains in my eyes. :)

review-person-icon Sneaky Source | Artstation

Great Course!