Game Ready Tree Creation from Maya to Unreal by Levelup.Digital (Simon Barle)

Simon Barle, a foliage artist who worked on Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefield V, walks you through his entire AAA workflow for creating a game-ready tree. This isn’t just a button-pressing tutorial; it’s a deep look at how a pro thinks about photogrammetry, high-poly sculpting, and engine optimization.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Use photogrammetry as a reference tool for understanding natural shapes.
• Sculpt high-poly tree trunks, branches, leaves, and berries in ZBrush.
• Create and set up UVs for complex organic models.
• Build a tileable bark texture in Substance Designer.
• Texture the entire tree in Substance Painter.
• Prepare the model for a game engine and build a custom Unreal Engine shader.
• Optimize assets for production without sacrificing visual quality.

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Familiarity with the software used (Maya, ZBrush, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Unreal Engine).
• Tools: A 3-button mouse and a drawing tablet are highly recommended for sculpting.
• Hardware: A computer capable of running the listed software, with a dedicated GPU for Unreal Engine.

📝 Description

This course skips the fluff and gets straight into a production-proven pipeline. Simon starts by explaining how he uses photogrammetry not as a crutch, but as a tool to study real-world shapes and surface details. From there, you’ll build everything from the ground up.

You’ll sculpt the high-poly tree components in ZBrush, focusing on the organic forms of the trunk, branches, and foliage. Then, it’s into Substance Designer to create a custom, tileable bark material. The texturing phase in Substance Painter brings everything together, giving the tree a grounded, realistic look.

The final part of the course is all about engine integration. Simon shows you how to set up the asset in Unreal Engine, create a custom shader for the leaves, and build LODs and billboards for optimal performance. This is the kind of practical, no-nonsense workflow that saves you hours of trial and error.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Intermediate 3D artists who want to learn a professional foliage pipeline.
• Game environment artists looking to improve their vegetation workflow.
• Anyone who wants to see how a AAA studio artist approaches asset creation from start to finish.

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Simon Barle is a foliage expert with 8 years of experience in the game industry. He has worked on Star Wars Battlefront and several Battlefield titles while at DICE. He is currently an Environment Artist at Ubisoft in Sweden. His work has been featured in 3D Artist Magazine and 80 lvl. He is passionate about combining different techniques to achieve high-quality results in vegetation.

🏁 Final Result

• A fully textured, game-ready tree model with a custom Unreal Engine shader, LODs, and a billboard, ready to be dropped into a production environment.