Balancing performance and detail

I’m often inspired by games. In this case, that game would be the original Crysis. When it came out I was in awe of the foliage, the shading of the trees in particular. So I set out to figure out how it all works. Leaf cards, bent normals, lods, wind, it all gets pretty tricky.

The first 3 pictures below show my testing in Unreal 4.27. The goal was massive numbers of trees with wind that could create a believable canvas of trees running at 120 fps.

The second 3 pictures are Unreal 5. These trees are higher quality, but performance takes a hit. That said, the lighting is beautiful. Everything is running real time, and I made the trees.