Foliage for games

Maintaining a low polycount with a good looking foliage needs some techniques to achieved it.
The method is very effective in making your foliage look rich, puffy, and not flat. Starting from gathering, analyzing, blocking up to the presentation of your asset the workflow is straightforward.

I. First thing is to gather references and pick which silhouette and look you need. Analyze the plant's parts structure, color, and silhouette.
Prepare the leaf and stem textures for SpeedTree use.

II. Map the textures in Speedtree and create the plant's parts. Export each part as textures. Assemble those parts to following the references that you have.
III. Create the material in UE4. One good thing about UE4 material is the ability to easily tweak attributes of your material making your workflow easy and faster.

I made 2 model versions of this blueberry. One model from Maya and one model from Speedtree. So which is easier and faster? For me, Speedtree is faster if you know how to use the leaf cluster mapping tool. In it, you can use anchor points to pin where your leaf mesh will be placed. Then just by dropping the material and it's done. You may also go back and just move those anchors if needed.
In Maya, you can make the parent card(plane poly) live so that you can translate, rotate or scale your child cards attached to the parent.
In SpeedTree you may also deform meshes that you made. Add noise, twist, stretch and bend it as you need which is also the same as in Maya. I think the advantage of SpeedTree is the faster iteration of parts.

Here are some features that SpeedTree has.
1. Baking of texture maps and the option to adjust the HSV of the texture maps.
2. The leaf collision(removes colliding leaves). The season option ( previews your plant's look in season)
3. The wind physics, and the pre-made environment lighting wherein you can easily preview your how your model looks in different times of a (lighting) day. Enjoy creating! Cheers! :)