God of War Ragnarok - Ironwood: Trees Renders + Houdini Tools

These are a selection of the tree/root/canopy models I made as the Level Lead for the intro of Ironwood (up to the treehouse).
All models/materials/textures in these shots/videos are by me. The trees were also visually developed by me.
See bottom for tree/canopy tools videos/information.
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Ironwood Tree Tool:
The outsourced visdev for the ironwood trees was extremely loose and it was a huge challenge figuring out how to translate the idea of a large eroded, rusted, and mangled looking metal trees. I spent some time prototyping looks and given the variety that would be needed in the set and the complexity of the look, making a tool to create them seemed liked the right solution. I decided I wanted the tool to process details onto an existing "outline" model that would define the basic shape but not need to be high poly or have any details.
Tool Steps (see image):
1. Sculpt the rough outline of a shape.
2. Then the tool would process it in a variety of ways, generating curves that defined the length/simulation direction, and processing the model for thickness and an initial internal model pass.
3. I'd run a simulation on top of the processed model to generate an interesting flow and the outer metal "bark" of the model.
4. That simulation would go through a variety of processes to become more interesting looking. Adding more variety to the curves; spikes, breaks, etc.
5. The simulation would be meshed and merged with the internal model. A "low poly" version would also be generated for use in the detailing processes.
6. Scales near the canopy and rust erosion would be procedurally generated on the model.
7. A further two simulations could be run to generate melted metal on the model.
8. All of the processes are combined together into a high poly model with vertex painting for the various elements (to be read by a substance material during the baking process).
9. A noise pass is done, masked by the various elements.
10. A low poly mesh is generated.
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This was a tool that took a long time to develop, luckily I had an entire plant set to develop that was more straightforward, so I slowly chipped away at it over time. In general I think this workflow was successful because it allowed me to art direct the overall shapes in Zbrush very quickly and then it was just a matter of processing them. It wasn't a big deal to go back to a shape and tweak it, then re-process it or go back to a certain cached point and re-seed for different results.
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Ironwood Canopy Tool:
This was an entirely procedural tool for generating the metal "broccoli" canopy set pieces that populated the tops of the trees and jungle floor. I felt not making them part of the tree models allowed artists to have a greater variety when creating the trees. There's not much to say about this tool, it only took a few hours and was pretty straightforward to make.
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Parameter Serializer by Leonard Cremer (This allowed me to save off the hundreds of settings from the tool into json files that could be loaded and re-populated.)