This multi-week project required a lot of effort and technical know-how. I focused mainly on visuals and technical art, as we had plenty of team members working on coding. Another artist and I set up a custom foliage system that is scalable, beautiful, and—most importantly—resource-efficient, ontop of a bunch of custom shaders. and thats why ill mostly focus on that aspect in this portfolio item.
Our foliage system in HDRP consists of 2D textures applied to cross-sectioned planes. This ensures we use as few vertices as possible. We then apply a custom shader to the black-and-white 2D texture to add color. A color gradient is projected onto the texture, allowing for visual detail while still making color adjustments easy and efficient.
We use a similar technique for our trees. We pre-made the trees in Blender, using a particle system to place 2D planes within a mesh. These planes are used to project leaf textures, just like with the grass, giving us full control over coloring. The branch texture is a flat, pre-made texture, designed to reduce mesh complexity. Due to time constraints, we didn’t focus heavily on detailed tree textures.
On top of this relatively advanced foliage system, we also included a secondary type of grass and flowers. The only slightly more vertex-intensive asset is the flower, which uses about two more vertices—but overall, the system remains extremely efficient.
Below you can find a gif of the system in action.
We made use of multiple shaders—for example, we have separate shaders for grass and tree foliage. The grass uses a more simplified shader compared to the trees. It relies on standard vertex offsetting, where we offset the vertices and their textures based on Perlin noise.
The tree shader, however, uses a gradient to control how much movement or offset is allowed. Technically, the grass shader also uses a form of gradient, but it's based on the UV map rather than a definable gradient—making it more static. In contrast, the tree and leaf shaders use a configurable gradient to mimic more natural movement. For example, the base of a tree doesn't move as much as its branches, and the gradient helps replicate this effect.
We chose to use a simplified version for the grass since the visual difference is fairly minimal. Unlike trees, where the movement can vary greatly based on height, grass sways more uniformly. If you look closely at the video above, you'll see that the branches sway much more than the tree base, accurately mimicking natural motion.
Below, you can find a snippet of our Shader Graph setup.