Longleaf Pine Forest Habitat & VAP v2
I worked as a Foliage Artist on the Longleaf Pine Forest Habitat and version 2 of the Virtual UCF Arborteum Project as part of the Harrington Lab with Dr. Maria Harrington. I was responsible for rebuilding every plant model included in the original Virtual UCF Arboretum in higher fidelity for use in Unreal 5 with Nanite, and implementing them into our existing level and packaging them for sale on the Unreal Marketplace. I completely recreated each mesh and texture for 35 species of the Florida plants from the ground up, using a combination of traditional modeling techniques and photoscanning to achieve photorealism without industry-grade scanning equipment.
Given that the Virtual UCF Arboretum is a data-visualization of the real world, it was extremely important that our updated assets were made with both visual fidelity and scientific accuracy in mind. As I created each model, we went through an iterative process of comparison to real-world examples to ensure their accuracy.
In November of 2023, we published all of the plant models for sale here in the Longleaf Pine Forest Habitat Plant Pack on the Unreal Marketplace.
Below is a gallery of some of the plant models I created compared to their real-world counterparts.
(Real world on the left, model on the right)
