Gigantic fluffy fir trees! A combo of hand-painted textures, backyard photography, and Unreal shaders brings this scene to life. I learned a ton of random tips and tricks related to foliage and texture creation so I could make all these Pacific Northwest plants I grew up with. The Blender add-on "Sapling" is awesome for making tree trunk models. I was new to blender and only had to learn a few basics to use this. Since Photoshop discontinued 3D features I highly recommend materialize- a free software for making texture maps from images; I'm surprised this is free.

!!! Some straightforward YouTube tutorials that made this possible:

Landscape layers for beginners (unreal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWOlIvq0Etg&list=LL&index=2&t=641s

Vertex painting (unreal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRLG9Mgm5Kk&list=LL&index=4

Quick overview of Bump offset vs POM (unreal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc0StMr3CQo&list=LL&index=5&t=708s

Making fog (unreal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2dIb2b6qew&list=LL&index=7&t=175s

Niagara dust particles (unreal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGOV-72ytig&list=LL&index=34

Water shader (Dean Ashford vids r great) (unreal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqZnWuLrDO4

Vertex normals for foliage (maya): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU7VD4s4pyA&list=LL&index=4

Blender Sapling tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMDRc4hJwvA&list=LL&index=42

Materialize for texture maps from images (only tutorial you need): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMrWNe2EWAk&list=LL&index=1&t=1018s

*My final note* Download Maya bonus tools (free) so you can speed up modeling in ways like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boxakNJ-b5M&list=LL&index=3&t=5s