Creating Organic Materials - Blender Cycles Materials and Textures - page 305

In case you need them, you can find several free tree models in the Blender format and also
their billboard versions at http://yorik.uncreated.net/greenhouse.html .
For this two-part tree shader recipe, we will instead use a model coming from the many
environment assets of the CG short Big Buck Bunny , the second open movie produced by
the Blender Foundation. All the movie assets are free to be downloaded, distributed, and
reused even for commercial projects because the short is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0 license (refer to its official website at http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by/3.0/ ) .
The general shape of the tree and the leaves is pretty toyish. This is because they are
elements that have been drawn to match the toon style of the furry characters, but it's
actually perfectly suited for our demonstration purposes. The final rendered tree from
Big Buck Bunny is shown in the following screenshot for your reference:
The final rendered tree from Big Buck Bunny
The tree model is composed of several parts: on the first layer, there are the tree_trunk,
the tree_branch, and the tree_branches meshes, and on the second layer are the leaves,
made by a single leaf object dupliverted on the tiny faces of the leaves_dupli object. (That
is, the leaf_tobeswitched object is parented to the leaves_dupli object, and then, in the
Object window and under the Duplication subpanel, the Faces duplication method has
been selected, the Scale item checked, and the Inherit Scale value set to 1110.000 .
This way, the leaf_tobeswitched object is instanced on the leaves_dupli object's many
faces according to their location, rotation, and scale.)
On the 11th layer, there are three leaf objects with three different levels of detail: a simple
flat Plane, a subdivided and curved Plane, and a modeled leaf. Their presence is only to supply
the low, middle, and high resolution mesh data. By selecting the leaf_tobeswitched object and
by going to the Object data window, it is possible to switch between the leaf_generic_low,
leaf_generic_mid, and leaf_generic_hi foliage levels of detail.