A photoreal forest, from Megascans and one photo

While everyone was posting Astra-in-Blender modeling, Michiyoshi Shirota tried a blunter idea. Skip the sculpt. Hand the model Megascans assets only, plus one reference image, and ask for a forest. Photoreal, he thought, might fall out of the library rather than out of a generated mesh. The result, he says, is pretty good.

Then he undercuts his own demo: maybe this did not have to be Astra. That sentence is why the post belongs here. A lot of clips exist to crown a model. This one is a hypothesis about inputs. A scanned twig is already halfway to a photograph. The model’s job is taste, placement, and light.

One reference image is a very small brief for a forest. The clip is how much of the photograph was already hiding in the asset pack.