Trees are a big part of our world and are essential to creating a believable digital environment. Nature is inherently complex and 3D trees are one of the most complicated, time-consuming and challenging assets to develop.

We understood the challenge and wanted to ensure what we offered to you in its finality was as faithful to nature as possible and was based on a solid foundation.

Our team quickly recognized just how daunting of a task it was to not only build something that looked good but also follow the rules of botany. Striking this balance of aesthetics and science has taken years of hard work and development to ensure that every piece we produced matched the accuracy and quality of the rest of the Megascans library.

And after the culmination of extensive research, development and iterations on how to capture these complex and beautiful living things, and building on top of our previous release (Black Alder pack) — it gives us great joy to announce the latest release of Megascans Trees: the European Hornbeam pack.

Megascans Trees are now available to download for Unreal Engine 5 on the Unreal Engine Marketplace and ready to use right out of the box to easily create optimized forest scenes. The new assets in this release allow you to add even more variety to the vegetation of your outdoor environments in minutes.

What’s in the pack?

The European Hornbeam collection is a complete tree species pack containing 27 unique tree assets: 10 forest trees, 4 field trees, 8 saplings, and 5 seedlings; all to help you build a photorealistic hornbeam forest.

A dynamic shader is included to provide procedural controls over seasons, health, wind, and many other functionalities compatible across the entire Megascans vegetation library so that your environment can truly have an incredibly distinct look.

The trees are optimized with unique LODs, shader quality tiers, and various wind implementations (simple + pivot painter) for maximum performance. All tree variants are set up for painting and can be dragged and dropped with little effort to create dense realistic forest scenes.

With this latest release, both the Black Alder and the Hornbeam packs are now supported in both Unreal Engine 4 and 5, giving you the ability to leverage these trees regardless of which version of the engine your project uses. We’ve made improvements to both the global foliage actor and the tree foliage shader, which should function the same between both versions.

 

The Megascans trees are in early access, and currently available to download from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, with options for both Unreal Engine 4 and 5.

We are excited to hear what you think about this latest release. We look forward to your feedback on how we can better enable you to create high-quality 3D experiences by simplifying world creation. Show us what you’ve been working on using the hashtag #MegascansTrees and connect with us on our Quixel social channels.

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