Gameplay Trees Upgrade

In Assassin's Creed Shadows there is 2 type of trees the regular decorative ones and the one you can climb and run on, called gameplay trees. During the polish phase, Théophile Lebeau asked if I wanted to help refine the gameplay trees and push their overall quality. It was a small but fun task that lasted a few weeks.

The main challenge was to preserve the primary shapes, as these assets had already been placed hundreds of times throughout the game. Instead of making major structural changes, we focused on sculpting inward, refining the internal flow, and enhancing the trees with mid and small-scale details—all while ensuring they remained gameplay-friendly.
Because of the size of the asset, It needed to be a simple global normal on top of tilable with baked vertex color.

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The original SpeedTree assets were created by another artist earlier in production. To retake them they were imported into 3ds Max, where we detached the branches from the trunk. This allowed us to refine the visual quality without redoing the entire SpeedTree and Houdini setup.

Once prepared, the mesh was imported into ZBrush, where it was sculpted by hand, then decimated and baked in Substance Painter.

It was a short and straightforward task, but I really enjoyed it—especially since I worked alongside Théophile Lebeau, a great artist and friend with deep artistic and technical expertise.
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As always, the final result was a team effort, involving experts from various fields, including tech art and collision handling.
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Art Direction, Thierry Dansereau
Lead Architecture, Dominic Gladu-Despatis
Lead Texture, Dimitri Alexis
Lead Props, Antoine Barbot