Star Atlas - Foliage

During my time at Star Atlas I was often wearing many hats! One of those hats was as a foliage/biome artist, something I've found that I really enjoy!

I just wanted to showcase some of the foliage work I created during my time at the company. This was for a high speed racing environment, I would have liked to bring these assets to greater detail had I the time to do so, but the main focus was on it's shape language, and large forms being represented.

These two types of trees would have existed in two different biomes, a dry more arid biome and the other being a wetter, tropical biome.

The palm trees were heavily inspired by fan palms, but with a stylized alien twist. The Arid trees were inspired by some of the desert cypress trees with sprawling roots and a very defined canopy. These trees were also made with Unreal Engine Nanite in mind. Everything is geo on the palm trees no alpha was used, and the modeling itself was all capped off for efficient performance.

I really enjoyed this part of the project, a lot of look-dev and testing went into finalizing the look of these trees and I'm quite happy with how they turned out!

A thank you to Marcel Van Vuuren for providing concept art and direction