Western Red Cedars
The Western Red Cedar is a large coniferous tree native to the Pacific Northwest. It grows in wet temperate forests near the coast, and is easily identified by its fuzzy red bark and scaly needles. The tree can grow to 60 meters or taller and often has a thick trunk in excess of 3 meters. Most of the oldest specimens have been logged, but young Cedars are common in both natural and urban settings.
Also known as Thuja Plicata, Pacific Red Cedar, Giant Arborvitae, Giant Cedar, or Shinglewood.
This is a pack of 17 unique tree assets, including 12 "live" trees in a full range of sizes and 5 "dead" trees.
Having developed many new modeling skills over my previous tree releases, I decided to depart from strictly "generic" trees and do something readily recognizable to Pacific Northwesterners. I spared no effort on this pack and it’s my proudest modeling achievement by a wide margin. Each tree is lovingly handcrafted and carefully optimized.
I aimed for a reasonable compromise between authenticity and performance on these. I consciously omitted some of the trunk knots, exposed roots, etc that are common to older Red Cedar trees because they multiplied the tri counts considerably and actually looked worse in-game.
While I looked exclusively at Western Red Cedars for inspiration, these assets can stand in for visually similar trees such as young Coastal Redwoods.
These trees like sheltered areas with lots of fresh water. They work particularly well in mountainous river valleys.
I recommend using Forest Brush Mod to get a nice distribution. Place the taller trees with high canopies in the heart of the forest, with the thicker trees that get more sunlight around the edges and clearings.
Use the dead and smallest trees sparingly. I recommend hand-placing these or brushing them in small clusters.
– All 17 trees in the pack share a single set of 512 x 2048 textures. The Loading Screen Mod should eliminate the vast majority of functional RAM requirement for this asset. All 17 Cedars together are roughly equivalent to one or two vanilla assets.
– Tri counts range from 33 to just under 800, and are detailed in the image above. These tri counts are considerably lower than the vanilla trees of comparable sizes.
– I did NOT alter tree sway on these assets. Based on my experience with the previous packs, I now recommend using the Tree Movement Control mod to reduce sway, which can eliminate sway on LODs as well, and doubles for random tree rotation.
– Because these trees are so large, Tree LOD Fix is necessary but not sufficient for these trees to look good. I also recommend using Ultimate Level of Detail and turning the Tree LOD Distance up to 2000 meters or so, if your computer can handle it.
