Rendering

Foliage Looks Fake or Flat

Plants that read as flat cards or have wrong lighting

Also known as: Fake looking foliage · Foliage cards flat · Tree leaves lighting wrong · Foliage shading · Two sided foliage · Game vegetation looks bad

Environment Rendering Technique

Quick answer

Foliage looks fake when the leaf cards are flat and uniform, the lighting is wrong for thin surfaces or the movement is mechanical. Use two-sided foliage shading so light passes through leaves, shape and layer the cards in volume with varied angles and sizes, use softened or spherical normals on leaf clusters so lighting looks like a soft mass, add color variation and a little translucency, and drive wind with World Position Offset and vertex color.

How to fix it

Build clusters of leaves instead of single leaves, and avoid all cards facing the same direction. Keep the alpha edges clean with enough padding, and use masked materials with anti-aliasing. For distant trees use LODs or billboards, and watch overdraw, because foliage is expensive. Compare with photos of real plants in different light, and check the shape from far away, since silhouette matters most.