MINI Coral project

As a final push for my ocean-themed project, I wanted to release a free asset as a thank-you to everyone who’s been following along. It also felt like the right moment to finally explore Blender’s geometry nodes — something I’d admired from a distance but never properly used.

Unsurprisingly, I ended up making coral.

Using curves and instanced meshes, I built a procedural system that generated organic coral shapes with randomized rotation, tapering, and height variation. Each element was simple but carefully UV-unwrapped and texture-painted to allow for subtle colour fades and surface detail. Visually, the results were some of the best I’d produced — especially in renders.

The real challenge came when converting the geometry nodes to a mesh. The UVs collapsed into an unusable layered structure, and because the material relied heavily on UV painting, any attempt to re-unwrap destroyed the texture alignment. After a lot of trial and error, I rebuilt the UVs and textures specifically to survive conversion.

Baking introduced a new problem: textures that looked correct pre-bake degraded dramatically in resolution and colour accuracy. After extensive testing, I accepted that I’d likely pushed geometry nodes beyond their current practical limits for game-ready assets — particularly when targeting Unreal Engine with 2K procedural materials.

While disappointing, the project wasn’t a loss. The asset still works as a rendered showcase piece, and the process taught me a great deal about the strengths and limitations of procedural workflows. It won’t define the standard for my future free assets, but I’m glad I pushed through and finished it.

If anyone has tackled similar issues or has insight into better workflows, I’d genuinely love to hear about it.

An Actual usable Game ready Variation of this will be made public soon just got to bake some textures and make sure I'm not running into more issues. But I should state the expectations of it should be managed as it is still the same concept just with a material structure that allows for baking and use in unreal engine. but you can probably see the different in them above already.