Frozen Trees - Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok

One of the tasks I worked on during Assassins Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok.
I had the ownership of a kit of newly created vegetation assets for the game. A set of iced flash frozen trees.
I have experience in vegetation and foliage creation, but this was another beast entirely.
The worst part of of course is a enormous performance hit this trees could inflict. Normal vegetation is one of the haviest elements of a rendered scene, due to overdraw and vertex animations. This comined with the natural high poly demands of icicles and subsurface scatter of the material.
I worked on the models in houdini , create the materials in substance designer , and worked on a custom shader for my specific needs.
In houdini simulations were used to create accumulating ice and icicle, baking that into low poly. I also turned a certain amlount of icicles into cards , as the polycounts where ridiculous .
The Ice shader was modified to take in custom bakes from high poly , some additional details , and color variations as well as support cards and sss on them similar to the opaque material.
I also created frozen leaf branch cards for the different trees and their frozen barks in susbtance designer.
Thanks to
Art direction: Eddie Bennun, Nikola Stoyanov
Technical art direction: Yavor Yakovliev
Lead environment art: Nikolay Peev, Biser Parashkevov, Martin Kamburov
And the whole dev team !