Brushify - Tree Pipeline in UE4 [WIP]

I recently decided to put some time into Trees and foliage. It's still early days yet and I've yet to release any of these assets. Real-time Foliage is a difficult and time consuming subject matter, but I enjoy the blend of technical and artistic. This example is a Scots Pine tree close to where I live. It's one of the first tree's I scanned over the winter. As I get more comfortable with my scanning process and pipeline, and I'm happy with the results, I'll be steadily introducing these assets into Brushify packages.
To stress, the objective here is to create game ready trees (similar to the specification of the trees in Epic Games Kite Demo from 2015. ~25k - 30k tris for lod0, which is rapidly lodded down to the 2-3k at Lod1) that run in real-time on current and next gen systems. Texture memory is kept to a bare minimum, using only 3 texture maps (1 for trunk, 1 tiling bark texture, and another for the branchlet/leaf atlasses. Keeping performance in check in this way allows for dense forests with little performance overhead on the environment. This allows developers to spend memory and computational power on other things.
This pipeline is far more consuming than the simple generated trees that are currently provided with Brushify, but I believe this quality boost will make the products infinitely more useful and help to futureproof them.
Still a lot more to come. I'm working step by step and trying to find a good balance for quality/processing time.
I also wanted to document this part of my journey with Brushify, because I think it provides some value both to show others my processes, and for myself in the future. Having a video documentation like this helps me keep track of the steps and gives me a quick guide that I can refer to. I also think this information should be free for everyone, because if you are going to be doing something as difficult as recreating nature in real-time, you need all the help you can get!
Running the Youtube channel has also been a great way to bring more exposure to the project, and its lead to many great conversations and opportunities with artists and companies around the world that I otherwise probably wouldn't have had the chance to meet.
2021 is another difficult year, but I feel like there is light at the end of the tunnel, and if nothing else... i'll reach the end of this pandemic with a lot more tree's!