Dropzone Studios

DropZone Studio’s website is not a marketplace, but a site intended to share information about current and upcoming products. You can find prices and possible discounts through the following link on the Unreal Engine Marketplace.

All the packages got an option to add moss layer (by using second bark texture) to tree trunks and branches. Moss can be removed/added to trunks with a single mouse click thanks to our updated trunk and branches master material. Amount of moss can be adjusted with a slider from 0 to 1. This sounds like a small update but it really makes these trees even more realistic without any effort from the user.

Deciduous trees got a little fix for fall colors and an update that made it possible to use fall colors that only color part of the trees’ leaves. Also option to use dead leaves was added to leaf material. These both features are now available in the leaf material instances and is of course possible to use different settings in different instances.

Few screenshots below of these new released features.

All the DZ tree packages got an option to add snow effect to both leaves/needles and trunks/branches. Snow can be added/removed from trees with a single mouse click and the amount of the effect can be seamlessly adjusted in both materials with few easy parameters. This update gives the missing feature of having all the possible season variations in the DZ trees. Enjoy some screen shots of the upcoming feature below.

peeled bark for all dz trees

All the DZ tree packages got an option to add peeled bark effect to trunks/branches. Peeled bark can be added/removed from trees with a single mouse click and the amount of the effect can be seamlessly adjusted in trunk/branches materials with few easy parameters. This update gives the final touch of making trees exactly how you like them in your projects. Enjoy some screen shots of the upcoming feature below.

We realized that it wasn’t maybe the best idea to replace the other bark texture when adding moss to trees cause some of the trees really need the second bark and still might be nice to add some moss or lichen to them. So we made a totally independent moss/lichen part to trunk/branch material and the effect is even better than the previous one and is also improved by having an option to use lichen texture. In our opinion lichen needed to use a little more sophisticated alpha mask so it’s not only a texture change that was made for it.

Cleaned and better organized material instances

Material instances needed some tweaking to get them even more easy to use. Now when some seasonal or some other effect is activated, all it’s parameters will be placed under it, in the logical order. This way all the features will stay organized and it makes the use of the material instances even faster.

Wetness effect for all trees

Before starting to fully concentrate into the next tree package we asked ourselves what features are still missing in our trees. The answer came quickly when someone asked if the integration of DZ Trees to Ultra Dynamic Sky asset was simple or not. We found out that the integration was simple and added links to the integration diagram to all our product pages. And because we didn’t want that anybody needs to use any extra asset to have seasonal or weather effects in our trees, we decided to make a material function for wetness, cause it was the only major feature that was still missing. Now this wetness material function is integrated to both master materials but if someone still wants to integrate with UDS, our wetness section of the materials can be replaced with the UDS’ material function according to the link’s integration diagram.

FOLDER STRUCTURE TO BE SAME IN EVERY DZ TREE PACKAGE

For the easiness of migrating trees between different UE projects and DZ Tree assets, we wanted to name even the top folder of all our tree packages to be the same: DZ Trees. So now the folder structure in all our packages is exactly the same. This makes your and our living a little easier when migrating files between projects. When we, for example update the master materials, we can immediately migrate them to all our tree packages without file reference problems. And when you want to move trees from other DZ package to another, you can just migrate them and they will be nicely placed under the right folders and are using the same materials and material functions as the other DZ trees. It’s important to have the latest versions of both packages though when migrating.

Few screen shots below of new wetness effect, moss and lichen.

New package “DZ Trees – Deciduous Trees 2” includes birches, aspens and willows. This smashing brand new package is now for sale in the Epic Games’ MarketPlace.

little fixes/improvements for mask textures, tree meshes, leaf wind, colliders etc.

Mask textures’ roughness (G) channel has been inverted now to all our packages cause roughness map was accidentally smoothness map and didn’t give the right result. As default these textures have not been enabled in any of our tree packages so this fix is mostly made for those who want to use textures in roughness instead of a constant value. We will still recommend using a constant value to save texture memory. Also the outcome is nearly identical, so saving memory feels like a better way to go.

Leaf wind got a minor update so that the changes in wind speed is smoothened a little to prevent unrealistic changes in it.

We also remade colliders to all our trees in all our tree packages. Colliders were a thing that we overlooked a little earlier cause their accuracy is very dependent on their usage purpose and we kind of thought that every game maker will make their own colliders anyway. After a careful reconsideration we wanted to help most of our customers and decided to concentrate into performance and accuracy. Concentrating into both of these aspects would normally be quite a hard task but after thinking the usage of the trees, it became quite obvious that we should only have a simple capsule collider around the trees’ lower trunk. This is very light collider but at the same time it’s quite accurate and works for most games so that the player can’t run through the trees.

Also 15 meshes of the first deciduous trees got updated regarding roots. If you looked really closely, you could see that some roots weren’t perfectly attached to the trunk so we felt that we needed to repair them. They are all good now.

There are also other minor tweaks/fixes in material instances and textures.

Few images below of the new package “DZ Trees – Deciduous Trees 2“.

“DZ Trees – Palms” package is now released in Epic Game’s market place. Demo videos of these trees can be seen in our YouTube channel.
Merry Christmas!

DZ Trees – Bundle Vol2 (Deciduous Trees 1 & 2)
DZ Trees – Bundle Vol3 (Deciduous Trees 2 & Palms)
DZ Trees – Bundle Vol4 (Palms & Conifers)

We have added MPC (Material Parameter Collection) to our master materials so that you could adjust the amount of wind in seconds. Just open the MPC file and adjust one number to get wind power changes to all DZ Trees.

Because palm branches’ vertex colors were too hard to be manually painted to give good enough results for wind effects we needed to make adjustments to its’ wind material functions. New modifications worked so well that we decided to use new wind effects also in upcoming DZ low poly tree packages. Old packages will not be converted to use new wind material functions cause their hand made vertex colors give probably the best results for them. With these new wind material functions it’s still possible to make modifications to wind effects by tweaking vertex colors but as default they don’t need hand painting and are not hand painted.

Wind direction’s influence was added also to leaves movement in this new leaves material function. All the upcoming packages will probably use this new wind effect and possible extra adjustments of wind by making changes to trees’ vertex colors will be left for customers who want to experiment with wind effects.

All the tree models of this “low poly” conifer package are new models but are using the same textures (only pine needle texture is different) as the original “DZ Trees -Conifers“. This lighter tree package is made for those developers who want to spare disk space, memory and resources of their computer by using models with lower polygon count. So we have dramatically dropped polygon count while at the same time maintained the overall look of the original conifer models. We provide the original 4k textures but with reduced maximum display resolution to save memory.

These trees are all new models compared to DZ Trees’ original “Deciduous Trees 1 & 2” packages. They use mostly the same textures than the original packages but with reduced amount of display resolution. These trees are made for those who prefer a little less detail to save disk space and memory. Professionally made tree models, textures and materials ensure that the quality is in line with the best assets in the Epic Games’ marketplace even though these trees have less polygons than the original ones.

“DZ Trees – Conifers (UEFN Edition)” and “DZ Trees – Palms (UEFN Edition)” packages will be released later with different names because “UEFN” was not allowed to be used. Palms will probably be released as a low poly pack in UE Marketplace and conifers’ release date might wait until Fab is ready to take up new UEFN compatible assets for sale. Demo videos of these upcoming trees can be seen in our YouTube channel.

DZ Trees – Low Poly Palms is now released in UE Marketplace.
Sorry for the delay!

Some screen shots below.