Tree Lover
2022 - Today
Zürich, Accenture
This is not just one project but my responsibility across multiple projects.
For good three years now I am mainly responsible for digital tree designs that enrich our digital environments.
Every space looks more alive and closer to our reality with some greenery.
My work goes from stylized shapes and textures to as realistic as performance requirements let me reach.
I love to research growth logic of our selection on each new project.
Also I’m very proud to teach Speedtree and indurty standard processes at SAE.
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![An image of Greenspacing.]()
Baobab
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![An image of Greenspacing.]()
Maple
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![An image of Greenspacing.]()
Palm
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Sal
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Pine
Digital trees grow like this
From procedural and hand build growth
Each plant has their own form, shape, identifying features.
Researching those and planing the right approach for each digital asset is the first step for a smooth virtual growth.
Is it a Hero Tree? A center piece in the scene or will it be repeated to fill the environment with life? How it is applied defines the level of detail put in our model.
I contruct most trees in a precedural tool called Speedtree first and model out details after approving the design.
Details and UV’s for texturing happen in Blender in
my favourite workflows.
Tools
Blender / Speedtree / Affinity Photo
Low poly
Working mostly on XR/VR Projects during my carreer my products are super reduced,
super simple, super light.
In cases of desktop applications and pre rendered products the results can be more heavy in data.
Modeling and Sculpting
Modeling detailed meshes, form studies, texture baking tools for ambient occlusion. All those are modeled in Blender by reference.
Coloring and Texturing
After creating geometry and painting texrtures, those two get combined and sometimes billboards get created to displaly far away versions of out wegetations. Welcome to the jungle.
To the right we see a typical texture atlas including billboard images from whole trees that will be diplayed in the distance of our application. This is to ensure better render performance in an application build.
Prototypes get some hand painted paceholder textures like this by myself.
Sometimes final textures get done by a texture artist to ensure an coherent visual language across the whole project.
Below we can see finalizing scene of a Tree Asset Package.
Realistic approaches
The workflow ist almost the same, but here we need to pay more attention to real life proportions and gathering the right textures.
Scanning real foliage and phosohoping photos well is key.
Game Ready Assets
Always keeping perfomance in mind while building organic assets is just the start.
Including reduced levels of detail in asset exports is an standard in the game industry to ensure smooth performance by switching the models in distances to the user/player.
It’s production is tedious and time consuming on organic models. Tools are developing to make this process less time consuming.
Colider geometry and aditional UV Channels are also included in every model on every level to give programmers the tools to create shaders that simulate wind in the leaf textures by example.
