Crysis Foliage Normals?

[Bunglo]

This is mainly for you folks who work at Crytek but anyone in the know is encouraged to reply. I've been examining the normal maps created for the vegetation in Crysis, I was wondering how they went about creating them.

Did they create a gray scale displacement map in photoshop with a trusty tablet or something completely different? I'm leaning toward the displacement map option but I've yet to try it with my diffuse textures.

Any tips are appreciated!

[2d-chris]

Although the artist who made the c1 trees is not here I asked the guy who does the vegetation for C2

Ronny says "I created some highpoly objects for each of them, Basically it's rendered in 3dsMax. So all leaves of those trees which you can see on the texture are modeled"

Hope that helps

[Bunglo]

You are awesome, Chris! I was actually thinking about creating highpoly leaves and baking them, looks like I'll have to give that a go!

Tell Ronny I said thanks as well