How do they create this plants in god of war ascension?

[paineyes]

I was looking at this particular screenshot and i starts pondering..

how did they create the plant on the left? The tutorial I have been reading for years, suggested texturing diffuse with alpha map on top (which can be seem mostly in older games or games on spec-restricted hardwares like smartphones). But the plants in this game doesn't seem to be made out of that method...it look so good that almost seems to me that the leaves are all individual models.

So is the plants in the screenshot (particularly the one on the left) uses plane mesh with alpha map, or did some new techique surfaced that I am not aware of? (to say the truth, I haven't got myself updated very frequently in the industry in these few recent years).

[sushi]

I'd take a guess and say the developers used foliage generation software such as SpeedTree to model that bush. The leaves are most likely using the traditional diffuse over alpha method, just in a much more complex way.

It would be a total pain to model and orient all of those leaves individually