Experiment with procedural tree foliage with Blender geometry nodes. Going for an painted anime-background look.
I’m pretty happy with this result for in-game foliage. It holds up okay in high-res renders but there is still room for improvement.
In broad strokes, the way this works is by dragging out a volume with simple shapes (e.g. a cube), and the geometry nodes graph fills the inside of the volume with blobs that get populated with foliage cards. This means you can drag and skew blocks around and very quickly create entire forests of procedural foliage.
