First Frost

Comments:

• 

  nickbrunner
  

  Very nice, well done!

  Edited November 13, 2012
• 

  Mr_Lamppost
  

  Mystery faint line:

  This is caused by interpolation between the top and bottom lines of pixels in your autumn treeline image; one transparent, one not. There are a couple of ways you can fix the problem but for this situation this is probably the simplest.

  Select the plane with the treeline texture (Autumn Treeline.png). Look at the properties of the texture (Autumn Treeline), on the Image Mapping panel you will see an Extension: property with a drop down list of options. Change the selected option from Repeat to Extend and your line will go away.

  Written November 13, 2012
• 

  BMF
  

  Mr. Lampost: Thanks for the solution for eliminating the faint line.

  Written November 14, 2012
• 

  Wooxen
  

  Epic!!

  Written November 14, 2012
• 

  DagnyV
  

  Amazing, thanks for sharing. (Just went and saw all your other blends collectively, and I have to say, great job on just about everything!)

  Written November 16, 2012
• 

  nathanferguson
  

  Beautiful scene :D

  Edited November 16, 2012
• 

  BassWookie
  

  Hey man, how did you make your tree? I really like the look of it but I can't figure out how exactly you did the leaves ect on it... Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

  Edited March 12, 2013
• 

  BMF
  

  The tree was created using the Blender Sapling add-on. Go to user preference and under add-ons ensure that the Sapling is turned on (it's under the curves section).

  Then just add a curve object and you will see Sapling as an option. There are a lot of controls for the Sapling add-on, but there are also a number of very good tutorials on how to use them.

  As for the leaves, you'll notice that they are a separate object, which is useful. I move them to a separate layer because it's easier for me to work on just the tree trunk and branch by themselves and the leaves by themselves, but it really up to you.

  There are two ways (probably more) to texture the leaves. You can keep the leaves has on big object and use one leaf texture. That's the easiest, but it's also the least realistic. Trees have leaves of different colors like a mix of dark green, light green, some with brown, etc. And in the fall, trees have a variety of reds, oranges, yellows, etc. So the goal is to include all the colors that match the type tree and season such that those colors are randomly display throughout all of the leaves--which makes the tree more realistic.

  The technique I used is from a Greg Zaal tutorial on using the Sapling add-on. I highly recommend it.

  Basically, you want to divide the original object with all of the leaves into several objects that are randomly distributed and use a different leave texture for each of the new objects.

  There isn't room here to do a tutorial. See Greg Zaal's tutorial on the Blender Nerd website.

  Basically: 1. Select the Leaves object in Object mode and tab into Edit mode 2. Then select Faces so that you can see the face of each leaf (as opposed to vertices or edges). 3. Go to the Select option on the menu bar at the bottom and click on Random. By default that will randomly select 50% of the leaves.

  But that's not what you want. You want something like 3-5 sets of leaves so you can use 3-5 different leaf textures.

  1. To begin creating more than 2 sets of leaves, make sure the tool menu in the left side of the screen is displayed (press T). There at the bottom you will see the 50% default. You want to change that.

  Here is the tricky part. Let's say you want to create five sets of leaves at random.

  The first set is easy, a fifth of the total leaves is 20%, so type in 20% and then press P and separate by selection. That gives you the first set.

  Then select Random again. Since we have already subtracted 20% of the leaves we now need to select 25% of the remainder. So type in 25%, press P, and separate by selection.

  For the third set, select Random and type in 33.33%, press P and then separate by selection.

  Finally, select Random and type in 50%, press P and then separate by selection.

  By creating 4 sets of leaves plus the remaining 20% of the original set, you now have 5 sets of randomly selected leaves.

  Now all you have to do is to use a different leave texture for each set and that will distribute 5 varieties of leaf colors and shapes to the tree, giving it a more realistic look.

  When texturing the leaves, remember that they have some translucency to them that lets some light to shine through. Also, the image textures are not as bright as real autumn colors and so in the Shading section of the Materials for each leaf I added an emit value of about .25 but the settings should be slightly different for each leaf so they don't all have the same values. I did the same for Translucency. This gave the leaves the bright autumn colors I was looking for.

  As for all of the other material and texture settings, just reverse engineer the blend file.

  But I think the important part of the answer to your question was how to divide the leaves into random sets so you can add variety to the leaves.

  You don't have to use 5 sets. In my opinion, it just depends on the nature of the tree. In First Frost I wanted a lot of color. But in a summer scene, perhaps 2-3 sets would be sufficient.

  Hopefully I didn't leave out a step and that answers your question or at least gets you started in the right direction.

  Regards, BMF

  Edited March 13, 2013
• 

  farcodev
  

  I'm gonna use it in my hobby/free-GPL game project, FAR Colony, to illustrate the winter season. I cannot point you to a screenshot since I'm working on the revamp of the user's interface for the Local Surface panel, but you can read the last dev post @ www.farcolony.com Of course I will put you in the game's credits once I use your asset, so it's will be in, in the next release of the game. Thanks for your great work!

  Written May 29, 2019