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Realistic trees in the middle distance

1
By on Documentation

Michel Anders writes:

Hi,
In my ongoing quest to document the trade-offs in rendering I documented the costs and benefits in the several steps it takes to create a realistic tree that can be used in the middle distance. I aim to answer questions like how many particles does it take or how detailed should these particles be? Do you need texture maps at all and how important is translucency or transparency in leaves?

I hope artists can get some insights from this systematic approach. The full (and quite long) article can be found here.

Enjoy!

-- Michel.

About the Author

Avatar image for Michel Anders
Michel Anders

Although a Blender user for over ten years, I have to admit that I am an enthusiastic but (very) mediocre artist at best. I discovered however that I really enjoyed helping people out with programming related questions and a couple of years ago when Packt Publishing was looking for authors on the BlenderArtists/Python forum I stepped in. So far this has resulted in several books: Blender 2.49 Scripting, Python 3 Web Development and recently I started self publishing books on Smashwords and Blender Market. The current list consists of: Creating Add-ons fro Blender, Open Shading Language for Blender and my latest: Blender Add-on Cookbook I maintain a blog on Blender related things, 'Small Blender Things' and I keep an eye on the coding forums at BlenderArtists where you can also contact me via private message if you like, my nickname there is 'varkenvarken'. Recently I started offering some Blender add-ons on BlenderMarket, the first one is called WeightLifter, a vertex group tool, which is now accompanied by Space Tree Pro, an environment aware tree modeler for ArchViz and IDMapper a tool to create ID maps easily for Substance painter. I live in a small converted farm in the southeast of the Netherlands where we raise goats for a hobby. We also keep a few chickens and the general management of the farm is left to our cats. This arrangement leaves me with with enough time to write the occasional book.

1 Comment

  1. Grady on

    I wish Blender had an 'LOD' system for objects. Like, imagine being able to make 4 or 5 LODs of the same object, and then group them together as just one super object that automatically switches LOD based on distance (or even ray depth for Cycles). You could have trees with individual leaves, that then become low poly trees, that turn into billboards at a distance, all seamlessly, based on camera distance.

    It wasn't that critical for Cycles, but with Eevee on the way, I think it's starting to become maybe something worth looking into for Blender. There may be a way of achieving that result with Blender's existing tools (drivers, etc), but I think having a formal feature for achieving that would be really nice.

    Reply

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