I recently found this fascinating youtube video where the author comes up with a really cool, novel approach to making stylized trees. I’ve been trying for the past few days to recreate it in Unreal but I’m completely lost when it comes to transforming the leaf UVs like he does. Anyone got any ideas?
Hi there, I recently did this in unreal and the workflow is ultimately the same as the video here but the nodes are slightly different.
For the mesh, you need to make a ‘blob’ like he does in zbrush or your preferred modelling software. Then go into you UV editor and cut every single edge, and stack those UVs on top of each other, you can select the verts on the left side for example and then use your scaling gizmo (For example pressing ‘R’ in Maya) to flatten them all together across every edge.
I would also suggest selecting some edges and rotating them 90 degrees at a time, or flip them at random to avoid super obvious tiling.
After that you will need to ‘detach’ every quad from each other by splitting the vertices, for example in Maya you would go into the vertex selection mode select every vertex and then in the radial menu hit ‘detach components’. It may take some googling to find how to do this in your preferred software.
This then has your mesh ready to go, you just need to make your texture which is straightforward as shown in the video. From here the material setup would look something like this:
I also lerped the outcome of the WPO nodes with a simple grass wind node to get some movement in the shader 
Hope this helps!
Hello,
Sorry to dig up this post but I have a little problem with your method. When meshes are hand placed it looks very good but when I use foliage tool they fall apart. Any idea please ?
