During my time at SuperGenius as an environment artist for E McNeill's VR roguelike title IronStrike, I had the privilege of bringing his unique world to life. I helped to direct our 3D art team in creating ancient, crystalized plant formations and calcified vegetative growth for a variety or biomes, built to utilize a custom shader which would use color ramps and different procedural refraction textures that react to light.
The sequoia trees pictured were created with a modular pack of trunks and branches. The base of the branches possessed transferred normals from the side of the trunk on a gradient selection of vertices to create a seamless blend; This allowed for several variations of trees with different placements for branches on many styles of tree trunk at a very low performance cost, important in VR production.
Sculpts below of some of the crystal plant assets.
