Norway Spruce Tree Pack, Picea Abies

In this pack I'm presenting something very widely used - simple spruce trees, Norway Spruce. This being one of the more common type of evergreen spruces is quite often found in games.

I wanted to deliver great quality, variety and technical execution.

The trees in this pack are highly detailed and suitable for both previous ps4/xone gen and current gen ps5/xsx with appropriate scaling applied.

They are not nanite, but what I would call the best of the old method of foliage creation.

Video Overview:

https://youtu.be/gNvxm7z7NUw

Along side the trees you will find supporting assets that will help you create an awesome spruce forest.

Clutter like grass, branches, pinecones , rocks. Some medium sized bushes like a few wild privets and a fern. Along with a few rock formations.

Everything in the packs I do is created from scratch by me. In this one as well, you can find:

textures - custom created for the tree bark a few variations, tree branches, landscape materials like grass , pine, mud , rocks, rock textures, moss, others.

Custom shaders - these are also incredibly important to me and they are very flexible , scalable , adjustable :

Custom vegetation shader has a few features alongside the standard shading like unified non speedtree wind - you can adjust world wind using a material collection or adjust it per mat instance if needed. You can also build a blueprint to dynamically set the weather. Seasons and variation - using a LUT texture for the trees.

Custom landscape shader that is flexible and expandable. Custom landscape paint and wetness paintable on top of layers. A "moss" layer - this can be adjusted to paint a top layer youd like over the others , like burning and other.

Custom rocks triplanar shader - with directional correct normal , and many advanced features like edge damages , moss painting, custom data per instance.

Useful material functions - for example global wetness , you can adjust wetness by height in the world on most objects, or simply add the function to your own.

As for the trees themselves - there are 13 trees different sizes and canopy states. They all have custom made LODs and distances. You can further adjust the distances for your needs. They use my new wind model (same as oak pack) different from speedtree or pivotpainter solutions. Adjustable with a material collection for all at once.

Along with the models and textures there is an example level included. There you can find interesting level setups , lighting water cloud and other. For unreal 5 it is using lumen and nanite on some appropriate meshes(not vegetation).

These setups are optimized and well made enough to be used as an example for your own needs.

Small inclusion is also a simple blueprint to control the weather - it modifies the material collection adjusting the wind , and some quick post process effects. Use it as stepping stone to build something dynamic and cool.

Important ! - to view the example scene properly you need :

Extend default luminance range - project settings

Water - unreal plugin

Sun Positioner - unreal plugin

For UE5 - lumen,nanite, SM6 enabled - project settings

As a technical artist with years of experience on some of the largest triple A titles , I tried to bring something that is harder to get in the open marketplace - a consistent quality/usability and performance most of all. All the assets , materials and techniques are optimized and created with scalability and high performance standard .

Update: Updated project files will now contain a LOD4 octahedral impostor, that will greatly improve performance of larger scenes. They could come at significant memory cost ! Control for your project needs reducing mip bias or distance of the impostors! Only version 5 and 5.1 for now - version 4.x will also get impostors in the coming weeks.