The Beech Forest - Creating High-Quality Vegetation for Games

This scene was build for educational purposes, I have written a book about the process which can be found here:

https://www.routledge.com/Creating-High-Quality-Vegetation-for-Games/Spans/p/book/9781032785646
https://www.amazon.com/Creating-High-Quality-Vegetation-Games-Chico/dp/1032785640/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

For that reason this also became an exercise in simplicity, the entire scene was built with only a handful of assets, and the techniques used are simplified to make them accessible to everyone.

The vegetation scanning I have done myself, using only Photogrammetry, for the 2D data I resorted to top-down pictures, which are then prepared in Photoshop, and additional data such as Normal and Roughness are hand-made in Substance Designer (see .gif breakdown)

Additional set dressing was done with Megascans assets, I pulled in some rocks, twigs and leaves, and a single terrain material.

The book focusses on explaining the minimum amount while giving you enough knowledge to build on this further, it strives to make otherwise complex workflows simpler, allowing everyone to get photorealistic/high-quality results, the only requirement being that you have physical access to the subject you are recreating