Plantation Foliage Asset Pack
This is a set of foliage assets created in a Game Development elective course I took in 2020. Every model was made for the purpose of performing well in Unreal Engine 4, and the captures you see here are from Unreal. It was an interesting process learning how real-time artists create efficient foliage models, and I think that I successfully created a useful asset pack for anyone needing Southern US foliage.
Software Used: Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk Maya, Unreal Engine 4
All of the maps for the plants were derived from color photos. I took every one myself around my neighborhood except for the Tobacco Plant, which I pulled from the following image I found online.
I used Photoshop to isolate one leaf, de-light it, and create an alpha map and normal map. I added some spill color to the area outside the alpha just incase the map ran over. The normal map was created in Photoshop with the 3D filter for generating normal maps from a color image.
Here is an example of photos I took myself. I took photos of palm fronds against a pink poster board on a cloudy day. The pink poster was so that I could pull nice edges and the cloudy day was so that I would not have to de-light the foliage as much. I also scanned one palm leaf on my flatbed scanner so that I could use it as an element to add or remove certain leaves from a frond, and to have accurate reference for the color correction of my other images.
Here are some more source images for my Mexican Petunia textures. The one on the right is a scan from a flatbed scanner, a method I used for the Petunia leaves and to capture an extra palm leaf element.