I was responsible for the majority of the base materials for foliage used throughout Gears 5. I maintained the feature set and worked with our environment artists to solve a variety of issues. We started with Speedtree and built a custom wind solution and custom set of base materials.

Some of the included features:

  • Variable wind animation throughout CPU driven category changes.
  • Per asset (per category) wind animation tuning.
  • Leaf color tinting, with localized transition colors.
  • Material based fake sub-surface scattering and ambient occlusion.
  • Leaf distance alpha erosion for overdraw performance.
  • Detail texture maps.
  • Localized bending from character and vehicle interactions.

Base materials:
Ryan DowlingSoka

Models, textures, and material instances:
Akio Kimoto
Joey Kutzer

Billboard Impostors:
Tony Wang

Frozen Foliage Material:
Kurt Kupser

Multiplayer Optimized Version:
Stef Velzeboer