UE5: World Building Study III -- Game-Ready Foliage: Colocasia Polar Green Study

PURPOSE: 
In this project my goal was to use knowledge I've gained working in games to make a modern, game-ready foliage asset that would fit with my previous project(s) and hard surface models inside of Unreal Engine 5.
PROCESS: 
- Using the plant "Colocasia Polar Green" as a reference, I started with a block in inside of zbrush, followed by a high res sculpt. I then imported that high res sculpt into Maya. 
- I then created a 2048x2048 plane in Maya to use as the base for my high res bake inside of Substance Painter. 
- After the bake, I then used Substance Designer to create a simple opacity mask. 
- I brought that opacity mask back into Substance Painter and used it for my opacity channel. 
- From there I started to paint a base, using real world references (and color picker) to get a solid color for the leaf 
- After adding different color layers the leaf was then ready for export. 
- I then started to model out a new flat plane for the base mesh using the base color / opacity map exported texture files 
- after creating this plan with some resolution for folds and deformations, I started to create the plant in Maya: creating stems and varying the leaf size and placement to create the full plant 
- I then created three variations (A,B,C) and imported them into Unreal Engine 
- After Importing the meshes into unreal engine I created a material from scratch: plugging in the proper .tga files to the correct nodes but also added "scalar" and "multiplier" functions to better control the look and feel: from saturation, to roughness, to subsurface scattering, to normal intensity, to a wetness / droplets effect 
- After this I then plugged in a simple wind function to get some movement inside the scene 
- I then dragged the meshes into the "foliage brush" function in UE5 and began to paint the models into the areas I wanted as well as doing some individual hand placement, varying scale and rotation.