Norway Spruce Tree Pack, Picea Abies

Spruce trees are a staple of northern forests, and the Norway spruce (Picea abies) shows up in countless game environments. This set focuses on making that familiar tree look and behave well in both last-generation and current-generation projects. It delivers 13 trees, each with multiple sizes and canopy states, plus custom LODs and distances that you can tune further. The developer calls it “the best of the old method of foliage creation” — these are not Nanite meshes, but they are built with a clear eye on modern performance.

Thirteen Norway Spruce Trees and an Alternative to Nanite

The trees themselves are the core of the pack. Each of the 13 variants uses custom-made LODs with adjustable distance values, so you can push detail further out or pull it back depending on the view. They also use a wind model that is distinct from SpeedTree and Pivot Painter solutions. Wind is controlled through a material collection, letting you adjust world wind globally or per material instance. If you want weather to change during gameplay, you can build a blueprint to drive the wind and other effects dynamically. Seasons and color variation are handled with a LUT texture, which keeps per-tree material complexity low while still giving you a range of looks.

For compatibility, the pack is suitable for both PlayStation 4/Xbox One and PlayStation 5/Xbox Series X|S with appropriate scaling applied. The tree LODs, materials, and shaders are all created with scalability in mind. Because they rely on a classic clustered geometry approach rather than Nanite, the trees work well in projects where you need consistent shading, custom wind, or vertex-based control without virtual geometry overhead.

Spruce Forest Clutter and Supporting Assets

Beyond the spruces themselves, the pack includes a practical collection of forest clutter: grass, branches, pinecones, rocks, and a few medium-sized bushes such as wild privet and a fern. There are also rock formations that can anchor a scene without requiring separate modeling work. This means a single pack can cover the main tree population plus much of the ground-level dressing needed for a believable spruce forest.

All models, textures, and shaders are created from scratch by the developer. That includes custom bark textures with a few variations, tree branch textures, and a set of landscape materials for grass, pine litter, mud, rocks, rock textures, moss, and other ground types. You get a coherent visual language across the whole pack, which is often harder to find in marketplace collections.

Custom Textures, Landscape Materials, and a Flexible Shader Stack

The shader work is where this pack stands out. The custom vegetation shader adds a unified wind system that is not tied to SpeedTree or Pivot Painter, and it accepts global wind adjustments through a material collection. You can also override wind per material instance for individual control.

The landscape shader is expandable and includes a custom paint system. On top of the base layers, you can paint wetness on its own layer, and a “moss” layer can be adjusted to paint a top layer like scorched terrain or other effects. The rock shader uses triplanar mapping with directionally correct normals and adds advanced features such as edge damage, moss painting, and per-instance custom data. There is also a set of useful material functions, including a global wetness function that can vary by height in the world. You can drop these functions into your own materials, which speeds up integration across a project.

Example Level, Weather Blueprint, and Setup Requirements

To show how everything fits together, the pack includes an example level with interesting setups for lighting, water, and clouds. For Unreal Engine 5, Lumen and Nanite are enabled on appropriate meshes — the vegetation still uses the traditional pipeline. The example setup is optimized enough to use as a starting point for your own scene.

A simple weather-controlling blueprint is also included. It modifies the material collection to adjust wind and layers in a few quick post-process effects. The intent is to give you a stepping stone for building something dynamic, not a full weather system out of the box.

Note that viewing the example scene properly requires a few setup steps: extend the default luminance range in project settings, enable the Water plugin, and enable the Sun Positioner plugin. For UE5 specifically, Lumen, Nanite, and SM6 need to be turned on. These are all standard settings for modern UE5 work, but they are worth knowing before opening the level.

Impostor LODs for Large Scenes

An update to the project files adds an LOD4 octahedral impostor for the trees, which greatly improves performance when rendering large forests. The impostor comes with a caveat: it can demand significant memory. You can control that cost by reducing mip bias or adjusting the distance at which the impostor swaps in. The impostor is currently included for Unreal Engine 5 and 5.1, with version 4.x support scheduled to arrive in the coming weeks.

The whole pack is shaped by a high performance standard. The developer states that all assets, materials, and techniques are optimized and created with scalability in mind. For technical artists working on projects that need a reliable spruce forest without painting themselves into a corner, this is a solid foundation. The developer brings years of experience as a technical artist on large triple-A titles, and it shows in the balance between quality, usability, and performance. The pack avoids the typical marketplace trade-offs of pretty screenshots versus real-world frame rates. For indie developers and environment artists working in UE5, this is one of the more consistent spruce asset packs available.

More From The Same Workflow

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