Cherry Plum, Prunus Cerasifera - Seasonal Trees in Unreal 5

This is a personal project I have been wroking on for a very long time, in my spare moments.
It is inspired by the area around my house. In the Bulgarian Balkans there are places where people have cultivated lots of Plum trees, these plum trees then get spread around outside manmade fields across the mountain.
During the spring this creates these beatiful natural areas with blooming trees , all in white , everything around incredibly green and lush.

I first started it as a learning activity, to test and stress the nanite vegetation ability of Unreal Engine 5.
This proved incredibly difficult , as trees modeled in this way can be incredibly high poly, somewhere in the tens of milions.
Too much freedom of modeling , proves problematic. Even with modern hardware , meshes like that a very difficult to work with.

On top of that systems like wind , are not as simple as we used to do them before ( not that it was ever so simple)
For that I went on a jurnoey to create my own tools, to create the trees and technical setup.

A tool to create trees , base on premade branches. These branches still used tiny cards for leafs , but I made another tool to swap thouse later with fully modeled leafs in order to get fully opaque assets that work best with nanite.
This tree creation tool was needed to allow for full control of the parenting and there for paint - for the wind.

I also reworked my shaders in unreal to support all that. Wind will have a separate levels for 2 levels of branches , 2 leafs and entire tree.
This shader , I also worked in to use on clutter and small plants with parts of it turned off.

On top of that a huge thing that needed to be implemented for this seasonal vision were - seasons.
In shader and separate models for bloom ( with each flower modeled) . I dug into some blueprints , blueprint interfaces in order to create a full seasonal system - but also make it work properly with instancing. Something that bothered me for a long time, in order to use some logic on each tree when using tools like scatter/foliage paint Or even handplacing blueprints.
I made child blueprints of the original types and connected them with interfaces to swap the seasons.

I also wanted to upgrade the tree bark with some high poly additions , paint of moss and lichen and some custom photogrammetry pieces I took around the area. For this I also worked on some tools , to allow me to easily add geometrical detail , add small premade pieces from an atlas and keep the overall hirearchy of the tree.

In the end I spend way too much time to create this pipeline , but Ive learned so much about unreal and nanite in particual, and all similar workflows, and the future of vegetation in real time renders. Also Blender , lots of blender and geometry nodes.

https://www.fab.com/listings/535e176d-e188-4c9b-bd1f-19f4891b2247