The Secret To Realistic Trees In Blender 2.8

hi guys in this tutorial I'm gonna show you how to create more realistic looking trees using billa 2.8 and the sapling add-on I'll briefly be going through how to use this happing add-on and also if you use a sapping add-on before I'll be showing you why the current method of creating trees using something at all won't really give you reducing results and also how to go about doing it before I begin the tutorial I just wanted to quickly let you know about Skillshare it's an online learning community with over 25,000 classes in design business and more based on the classes I've taken Skillshare classes tend to be bite-sized and quicker to finish therefore allowing you to scale up really fast in whatever it is that you want to scale up in you can find a whole bunch of classes that may interest you there's a whole bunch of classes covering the newly released blended two-point-eight including the new real-time render engine Eevee and also the new 2d animation toolset I also put out premium classes on Skillshare many of which you won't find on my youtube channel best of all premium membership gives you access to any of the 25,000 classes and you only pay in less than 10 bucks a month which is SuperDuper affordable if you're interested in trying out Skillshare go ahead right now and click on the link in the description below to get two months of Skillshare absolutely free yep whether you're interested to know how to create photorealistic real time environments or even checking out my newest premium class how to master the new 3d modeling tools in blender you can learn right now absolutely free but you'll need to hurry up and sign up via the link in the description as this promotion won't last forever now on with the tutorial the first thing we need to do is we need to enable the sapling add-on infinitive 1:8 don't worry it's a free add-on that comes shipped with blender 228 so all you need to do is to go to edit preferences search for sapling and you will see something called the sapling tree generator go ahead and take that my default I already have a ticked but your version may not have that so go ahead and take that and now you have the sapling tree add-on enabled in leather 2.8 so first of all I'm gonna go ahead and remove all of this so here a and X delete so let's start fresh to generate a tree in our scene all we need to do is go shift a curve zapping tree generator alternatively can also go here add curb sapling tree generator straight away you'll see this little option over here called the sapling add tree option go ahead and click that arrow to expand it out and now you have an entire menu dedicated to making modifications to this tree so you can play around with the settings and properties of this tree to give it different looks and feels like you can change the geometry you can change the radius of the branches you can change the branch splitting all these other technical stuff like branch growth pruning if you want to add leaves and armature it will work on animation and things like that now I'm not gonna go through all these settings in this tutorial because this is not really focused on the sapling add-on this is mostly focused on creating a realistic tree so maybe later on I can create a dedicated video to the sapling tree add-on but I'm not going to focus on these settings here but just know that if you play around with these settings you can give it different looks like for example if I go to branch radius and I change the radius of the tree I can make the tree look fatter or skinnier I can also maybe play around with the branch itself and above that I can also play around with the branch spinning if I add different levels we can get more variations to the tree if I add more base bits it just tells you how much how much the tree will split from the trunk again these are stuff that you can probably find online in some documentation what these buttons me there's always the rotation angle and things like that so when I add leaves you just go to the leaves press if I show this hexagonal that's fine press show leaves and it'll be with slow and you'll see straight away you'll add 150 leaves to our scene so that's it that's pretty much the gist of creating a basic tree famillies aside and I didn't another tree add a sapling tree generator I can also go to said geometry and I can learn in different presets so if I want a willow tree I can create something like that which is really big if you want to create a weeping willow increasingly like that so we can get different different looks this is a pine tree when I get something like a Christmas tree you can get different different types of trees so that's pretty much the bare basics of adding a tree using the sapling add-on and also modifying the properties of the tree using the menu option bear in mind that if you add a tree to your scene and then you go into the 3d viewport and do some other operation like say even as simple as right-clicking you lose the menu option over here and you can't modify a tree anymore so the menu option disappears forever when you want to add a tree to you've seen make sure that you first add a tree to your scene and then straight away play around with the settings to give it a look that you want because after you make some modification to your scene it is destructive you can't go back and change it settings again that's just how these happen our own works so that's it that's the bare basics of how the sapling tree generator works if you render this out I mean it does look okay in the 3d viewport but it does not give you a realistic looking trees when you render it out so let me let me try that using example if I just give a simple material to this one we'll call this one the tree trunk and we'll give it a sort of tree trunk kind of a color I me a dark brown and then we'll also show the same one in the viewport display you'll see control V we don't need any smoothness for that one we'll just make it more rough and we'll apply it to each of these ones this will be a tree trunk this will be the tree trunk and then for the leaves we'll just give it a nice greeny texture like the color of leaves or something like that it will darker and then copy this controller seem to be for display and then apply to each of our models all this leaves okay so we have something that looks like this when we render it out let's just add in a simple Sun lamp light sunlight okay so it's a very very basic setup like I've seen we obviously make it look more realistic later on so ignoring the shading of this tree itself just looking at the model of the tree itself it doesn't look realistic when you look at real pictures of trees you don't see leaves like this hanging off the main branches like that what you see with especially with bigger trees but the trees tend to come in clumps of big ovals so basically if we break down the anatomy of a realistic tree especially a big tree we tend to find that being main branches tend to go out like this which is fine but for the second tree I don't does for us anyway but the leaves that come off these main branches tend to be clumped together in these big circularly kind of shapes this circle oval each type of shapes and the problem with the blender sapling add-on version of it is the leaves tend to come out of the main branches like this they don't come in these circling early clumps they just dangle off the main branches and that's not realistic at all like this one as well this is dangling off the main branches so in this image example over here it's like saying these old leaves are dangling off the main branches like this all the way to the end and that doesn't help us to give a realistic look of a large massive tree so what should we do to help fix this problem well we should create a clump of leaves in a sort of ball or an oval shape and it uses that to dangle off these main branches over here that will help to give it the appearance of a more larger more realistic looking tree that's the secret to creating more realistic trees but a lot of newer artists don't know about so whenever newer artists create trees looking like this using a sapling add-on they don't realize that it doesn't look that realistic to the eye so now let's go ahead and make more realistic looking trees that doesn't look like it was generated using the sapling tree add-on don't get me wrong I don't hate the sapling add-on at all I will actually be using something and on to help me create more realistic looking trees it's just that I find that a lot of artists don't really know how to use the tool well enough to create a nice and looking trees so now let's go ahead and start creating more realistic and more larger looking trees so let's just quickly hide out what we've created so far a mature looking sapling generated trees so let's take this eye and just hide everything also this is well all of this okay so that there are no seen anymore but I might go ahead and create a new collection and call this one who calls from main tree okay so we have a new collection unlike that in this collection I'm going to go ahead and create a new tree so we'll leave the sunlight there it'll be pretty helpful for us so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to design a realistic looking leaf so the leaf that I wanna create is purely gonna come from a texture texture I'm going to be using comes from textures calm you can create a free account and download any of these images that you want find any type of leaf that you'd like for your tree and go ahead and download those images the the texture that I ended up using was I think this one so I went ahead and downloaded the albedo the height the normal the roughness the translucency and also the Alpha so down on one each of these images and save it in a directory somewhere once you have those images we're gonna be enabling another add-on in bender so go to edit preferences and this time we're going to be using the images as planes add-on again by default I had that picked on but yours might not so go ahead and check that if it isn't it once you've done that just close that out let's go shift a image images as planes and started load in the images that you downloaded okay so the image I wanna be using is the albedo dot gif so import images as planes and let's go ahead and do some fix ups to this leaf texture so I'm going to go to UV editing and I want to change this one to the textured mode okay so straight away we can see that we have a simple plane with our texture applied automatically which is great so this is gonna be our leaf so we don't need to do any kind of real shaping toilet to make it over the leaf we can just use this image over here so the first thing I want to do is I want to go to control our and adding a loop cut right in the middle over here cuz I don't want to have this side of the leaf I just want to have only one Sun belief and I guess this is the back side of the leaf so I want to only be using the front side of the leaf so let's go ahead and set these two vertices and go ahead X delete vertices so that you have the leaf like this cool next thing I wanna do is we want to select or abilities biting a or you can go to select all and does the same thing and then just move your entire mesh until this little orange dot that pretty much goes in line with the stem of the leaf just a little bit right at the tip maybe just a little bit higher somewhere around there okay we'll have something that looks like that now I want to add a little bit of shaping to our leaf so I'm gonna go ahead and control our and add in a loop and slide it just in over here so control our click and slide just so that this loop goes in line with this leaf line over here and I'm also gonna add some horizontal lines over here so control our scroll up two times to add in three cuts you can also increase the double cuts over here and then we have a topology that looks like that so don't go ahead it's like this these vertices over here along the edges and then I'm just going to go ahead and hit G Z and move it down a little like so so just sort of shaping out what our leaf will look like now I want to go I dislike these three vertices over here let's turn on proportional editing and change this from smooth to sphere and then this will scroll down to turn down the influence and hit G Z to move it up on the z-axis so we're just really shaping out our leaf so now we've got a very basic looking leaf but a leaf is not square and we don't want to have this random bit of green stuff coming around like this so we just want to cut it out to the shape of the leaf so luckily in Texas welcome we've got an alpha map over here so we can make use of that in our texture so let's go ahead and go to the shading workspace let's go ahead and save just in case something crashes perfect now I'm going to go ahead and start to change the texture out a bit now I'm not gonna use a diffuse shaded throughout this tutorial I want to be using the new principal shader that comes with better 2.8 I think the images plane add-on was here before blended supinate and by default it uses diffuse so that's why it added as a diffuse shader for us we don't need that oops I am a personal volume it should be principled psdf connect the color to the base color and the B SDF to this mixture over here and we have something that looks like that now the transparent shader will be helpful for us to help to remove this outline over here so all we need to do is just load in the image to control which parts of it should be transparent so I hit shift D to duplicate the image texture and then just change this image texture by clicking this folder icon and this time we'll use the alpha dot gif this image over here a black and white one connects the color into this factor and now we have the the other parts removed promise we're using the Eevee rendering engine over here and Eevee shows this transparent part as black so we need to tell Eevee that this material should have transparency so go to the material tab over here and under the blend mode change from opaque to the alpha blend and straightaway it fixes out that issue and we can see through our leaf perfect so let's perfect this texture even more we want to now including the other textures that came along in Texas comp so hit duplicate and we'll start up by adding in let's say the roughness so click the roughness to the roughness node so now our leaf should look more shinier also in the three viewport it's got W shade smooth like that so it looks a lot more smoother and right now has a lot of even smoothness which just doesn't look right so we'll go ahead and fix that a little bit later let's just go ahead and complete our shader duplicate the Shale now and let's bring in the normal so this will control the bump so I'm gonna vector normal map and connect the color into the color change the color space of this from srgb to non color data and I'll create a normal into the normal so there's something that looks like that a proper leaf finally let's also add in this other texture over here the translucency and the translucency we'll have to mix with another shader so rather shift a shader translucent psdf and then let's duplicate this mix trader shifty to collect it over here I'll connect the translucent shaded I start mixing the transition shader with the final shader and I'm going to be using this image texture as the input for the translucency but right now it looks like the transparency part is not working properly that's because we need to add the transparency last and also before the trance see that applied so let me just change the ordering on that one around they'll move this one over here and this one over here click the transparent to this shader like so and collect the translucency to it this one so I will do I'm only doing anything special I'm just changing the ordering around let's move this color into this vector and sorry and remove this link over here and I think the ordering of this one should now be fixed oops just change this one to be the other way around cool so we've added a bit of translucency to our leaf as well translucency simply means that you can see some light coming through the leaf since this leaf is relatively big I guess there's not much translucency going on and also I guess our light is quite light as well our basic shader for our leaf is now complete if you want to control the smoothness of this leaf even further just go to shift a converter color ramp and add it in between there and then just use one of these sliders to control how smooth and that makes it look really smooth and we want to turn down the sliminess a little make it look more like a realistic leaf something like that looks a bit more realistic okay it's just a little bit of control on that on that aspect okay so the leaf is now done and I'll guess I'll call this one just for naming purposes let's go ahead and save your work next we're going to create the twig for our leaf so let's go back to the modeling and let's tap out of edit mode for that leaf let's start to create a basic twig so I'm just gonna move this out of the way real quick and let's go shift a curve setting tree generator now I want to create a very basic twig for our leaf so I don't need to have all this geometry going on it's too complicated so it's going to branch spinning and turn the levels all the way down to the lowest one and bass bits all the way to the lowest zero and let's go ahead and just leave it like that right now if I tap into edit mode it's all curves so I don't want to make I don't really care about curves as much so I want to convert this into an actual mesh so let's go to f3 convert - you want to go convert to mesh from a curve so hit enter and right now it's now a mesh you can have a twig that has this type of shape now or you can create different different variations of different types of twigs so I might go with just two for this tutorial so it's 50 and create a variation over here okay for this one I'll move all these linked ones so let's go set one of these vertices over here and go ctrl L to remove this and also turn off proportional editing so I want to remove this bit over here so go X delete vertices and also I think there's too much vertex data going on here so I guess we can simplify that even further so go to add modifier decimate and we will remove the number of phases from 192 - maybe becames - something really low very point - I applied that just reduces the poly count on what it does ruin the topology of our twigs alot but I guess in this case we don't really care about topology as much because this part won't really be seen in close up so now let's turn on proportional editing again and make some minor adjustments to make our twig look a little bit more interesting it's like this around like so straightened out a little bit I think that looks okay similar for this one as well we can just give it a little bit more of an interesting shape and this is also use a decimate modifier to reduce the poly counts quite a bit the point - so that will just reduce the number of vertices in this even the topology of the twig is ruined you want to keep the vertex count really low okay so let's go ahead and name this one tweak one and this one week two we're gonna create a new collection for this one I want to call this one tweak things let's click and drag this twig into this collection the twinks so that unbelt week collection we have these two tweets cool so next up we're just going to go ahead and finish off that week by adding in our leaves so let's go to material view and for the tweak let's just use a new material and I'm gonna create a new material called Twitter and this for now to use a brownish color I'm also copy that into the before display you shall see shortly I want to turn up roughness quite a bit and we'll also use the same texture for this one as well tweak and cool so now we're just gonna go in and stick the leaf onto this twig so scratch if T and move this over here our X X right here let's scale it up quite a bit like so and I'm just going to stick it on to the tweak so I'll just go into edit mode we can set that one s close to select it's like this one shift s selection to cursor so I can position it exactly in place like that and move it a little bit move it a little bit higher so our X X and we turn it around like that okay this is going along with the slide I'm just gonna go right now and simply just add the leaves to the tweet so probably gonna go in time-lapse mode so I'm not doing anything really fancy I'm just adding leaves to my tweak you so now that I have the twig setup I want to join them all into one mesh so all you need to do is simply select everything and hit ctrl + J all active object is not a set initially to select one object to be the active mesh hit ctrl J and also once you've done that you need to tap into edit mode so if you have your entire mesh like that and position it so that the the tip of the stem is around wears orange Center liners make sure it looks okay from the front and the side as well like so so as we've right in the center I'm also putting it and slightly above I'm going right on the tip over there place slightly above just to give it a bit of buffer when we add the particle system do the same for this one as well and yeah that's looking okay cool so let me double check that it's named correctly oh no it's not named correctly I'm gonna call this one tweet one again and this one was tweaked - and let's move them into the right collection so our tweets are now done now it's time to create that clumped Bush of these leaves that circularly stop the shape of all these leaves so don't move this aside g.x move them aside and let's start to create let's go shift s cursor to world origin to put it right in center again and let's start to create the little clumping of the leaves so that I want to use the sapling add-on again so the shift a curve SAP entry generator and without further ado I'll go straight into the branch growth and I'm going to increase the second part over here the length to go out wide like so and in the branch splitting I'll turn the trunk height to zero we don't want to have much height from the trunk and the split height to zero is well I guess gonna make a little bit more wider so our branch growth and then we just increase the length on that a little bit more I'll go back to geometry again and I'll call this one the lumped push preset and we'll skin export preset so now we have that as an option over here clump push okay that's cool we'll use that export a little bit later on but for now I'm just gonna go ahead and give an 8-week texture and we're gonna now add in the twinks to our clumps through Bush over here I don't know what's the right terminology I think this I'm not really an expert in tree tree terminology so I'm just cool at the club bush okay so for this one I'm going to start to disperse the twigs all around the the tree but first of all I need to define a white painting for this one because I won't be using the particle system let's go to the first of all to convert this into a mesh convert to mesh from a curb text so have something like that and I guess I want to turn down the number of vertices for this one as well just as preserve poly counts 28,000 vertices way too much weight point for it will help to save it a little bit fifteen thousand bits point to I don't want to make it yeah night doesn't miss okay and it's the shape is still holding up fine so I guess I'll stick to that one hit apply and I guess that's okay next up I'm going to go ahead and add in the tweaks to the this mesh over here and I'm to do that I want to be using the particle system so to use a particle system we'll go into the particles tab in the properties window hit the plus and change this from emitter to here now of course whenever I rendered this as here we're gonna be rendering them as tweaks so straight away I'm gonna go down to the render tab change this from render as part to render as collection the collection one we're using is the it Winx so since we have these two twinks in the collection it will be using either one of these two and ready pick it I drag them so we have a bit more variation so we have something that looks like that cool it's looking really nice also I want to maybe make it a little bit bigger and also want to randomize it a little bit I also wanted to take an account of rotation and for the rotation I guess I wanted to go from didn't modify the rotation a little bit more so where do I change this rotation it's going fast let's turn on rotation that's not writable normal i think normal is the one that looks the most correct so I'll stick with the normal I do want the leaves to come along these edges over here so I'm gonna be using a bit of white painting to control that even more so let's go ahead and in the vertex group and call this one please okay let's change this on object mode to white paint mode and let's just paint in the areas where there should be leaves so I'm not getting any uh there is some color coming through to control the white paint okay so it's a little bit hard to paint the weights on this one because the trees are so small so I won't do this in edit mode so let's go to edit mode and just it's like a show transparent and I'm just gonna color color in the areas where I want the leaves to go it has to definitely grow along these edges so just paint along the edges so to do that sorry I hit C on my keyboard to enable the circle select tool and I just clicked and dragged and I went around along the tips of the edges might increase the influence actually so they have more coverage of the branches that I may have missed out okay so what's our happy with that let's right click out of that one and then go to the side view and do the same thing so that we select all the words that we may have missed and also going to the top view and select a bunch of them as well okay so basically we're defining where the leaves to grow and we don't want the leaves to grow in this in these areas over here it doesn't make sense for leads to grow in this area and we go into this object I'll attempt over here and hits a sign over there so now we can see when you're going to every month that these parts are in red to indicate that the leaves vertex group are all in parts in red so we'll just make use of that in the particle system as well so for the particle system I'll go back over here sorry this one we want to tell blender that we want the tweak to come out from the we want to tell blender that you want a tree to grow from the particle system where we will just define the color so go to the vertex groups and for the density watch the leaves so the password in red will have the news going out and the parts where will we need pay anything at all where it's blue will have no leaves at all so the growth of the leaf should look a little bit more natural like so the size of the leaves depends on how big you want your tree to appear so if you want to create a really massive looking tree I suggest you turn the scale down and increase the number of leaves so in this case I've got a point four and then increase to say 2000 then the tree will appear bigger when you add it on to the tree and if I'm a smaller tree then turn the scale up and turn this number down so I want to go for a little bit of a massive tree so I'm gonna turn this number down like so I'm not really and massive tree but I are relatively message the point zero three yes something like that okay so I think that's that's looking good so let's go ahead and create several variations of this so let's lift a and hits up entry generator and I'm going to straight away go to geometry and load in the clumped push preset that we created before which is helpful and all we need to do is change the random seed to create a different variation so that we don't have them all looking so uniform so you have something that looks like that there you go and one more and have the clump push with a different seed value maybe a little bit smaller that's fine okay and we'll do the same thing with each of these ones tap into it convert all these three f3 convert to mesh so we'll go in now and will decimate each of these ones I'm going to point to [Music] apply decimate to decimate this one to point to and apply give each of these ones the tweak texture and we'll just create a vertex group for each of these ones to be okay and then we'll go into the edit mode make sure we have sure transparent selected and we just painted in the areas where we want the leaves to grow oops I don't want any of this part of me here we do want this part go from side view and pretty much do the same thing finally go to the top of you and do pre much the same thing just go all around get more of that coverage okay and finally hit assign okay once you've done that let's go ahead and use the same particle system for each of them February 2 the particle tab okay plus I wanted you to reuse that in the initial particle system well let's leave particle system and we wanted to grow from the leads okay okay I do the same for this one as well we use the leaves one and we want to grow from the leaves and new particle system leaves I want to grow out of the beets okay just a little bit more visual interest I guess we can I use some random scaling there which is good you may also randomize the rotations a little bit this just adds a helps to add a little bit more variation okay so now we need to convert all of this into its own mesh so we need to pretty much apply everything we need apply in the pallet system make them all as one standalone mesh so to do that just go into the particle system and hit convert and then once you've done that turn off the particle system remove it they're all individual measures so now that our twigs are separate objects from the actual particle system we need to do one more thing we need to make them all as a single user so right now it's sharing this mesh with 5957 other twigs so if I go ahead and join all of this into one mesh it freezes your computer and really makes it a really really messy so in order to solve that problem we need to first of all just detect all this and select just the ones we want to join into one mesh then go to object relations make a single user object and data then we say maximum user for selected objects okay so once you've done that now we can select the on one of these objects and then select the leaf and then hit control J okay so now they become one mesh so I'm gonna tell me to edit mode really quickly and select everything let's just move it all in detail proportional editing but that might slow it down a little bit we need to move this origin so that is in line with this orange dot so my computer might be your computer might be a little laggy when it does this okay so what's it done that we have the orange dot right in the center right there let's go ahead and name this mesh let's do it over here we'll call this one clump branch one and we'll save our work let's go ahead and do the same thing for pretty much each of these ones you okay let's Similac remove the tweaks we want to create a new collection and I'm going to call this one week lumped branches I will just put each of these clomp branches in the collection just drag and drop that there and now we're going to just to save that our viewport memory right now it's using up 3.3 gigs we're gonna just turn all of this view into bounds so that we're gonna see all this start over here so let's just change the viewport display from textured to wire or so bounce I do the same for each of them bounds whoops and bounce like so and now we just move them aside and now it's time to actually start to create our tree so I'm gonna move all this all this stuff aside so finally we start to create our tree so our shift s cursor to world origin and we're gonna do is save our work we're gonna go to shift a curb and again we'll use a sapling tree atom and here's where you can have the most sort of customizability the flexibility to the overall shape of your tree I'm gonna go for one of the default ones maybe I might go for the weeping willow so this is gonna be my large-scale tree so I think I'm gonna stick with that default on the debt and for this one I'll do pretty much the same thing like I've been doing with the other ones so I'll pretty much just go in and create a new vertex group first of all converting this one to a mesh for my curved text and defining exactly where I want the branches to grow out of we don't want any of this you know what the brightest word of any of this so we are something like that okay so we create a new vertex group we call them the branches assigned that cool that's it now go to the particle systems tab create a new particle systems make a type here go advanced under vertex group will go down to branches I don't want to thousands I want to escape it to something like 50 okay and we're gonna say render as type of collection and the collection is going to be our clumped branches like so now if I was gonna pick random okay let me just go and to change this room from bounce to solid real quick and this one as well from bounds to solid so we can start to see our tree taking shape but the rotation doesn't look correct so I guess I need to go to here again turn off the show transparency got a particle system pilot system to an on object rotation in rotation enabled that chances are normal are not really normal I might say global Zed or global X that's the one cool so I could have something good let's make these sides of it a little bit bigger I'm gonna double it 21 and it's time to take a little bit more of a shape let's change it up to be 100 and I think we now have a better looking tree but we can clearly see that this tree looks a whole lot more realistic to what we probably find in the real world compared to something like this so let's now complete our tree and give it a realistic bark texture for this one on when we're using this texture over here that 3d scanned tree bark from Texas calm so go ahead and just download each of these textures and let's go straight into the shading tab for this one I'm gonna hide the particle system for a second and let's go into the shading tab and for this one I'm going to include all the images that we just downloaded well let's just drag in the albedo drag in this one the height normal and the roughness okay so let's start connecting things up so I want to connect the roughness into the roughness I want to connect the albedo into the base color I'm going to connect the height into a sheila's add in a normal map vector little map and connect the color into that change this one from srgb to non color I have two normal into normal like so and also connect for the height we might feel a little bit differently we will just connect it directly into the displacement I look at that rendered it looks about right okay so the final thing I need to do is fix up the UV mapping for this one so let's go to the UV editor select control L of this one and this one as well control L and this one as well control L and this one control L I guess this one as well just as main branches over here let's let these ones here control L and the select all these ones and for sy s X no so it should be s sy okay but again we look at that and close up so that's fine let's now give this a final render and call this one good so for the final render I'm just going to go back to the modeling tab I'm going to be using HDRI image you can find any HDRI image that you'd like for your own scenes you can try out hgri skies calm I download one of these ones or you can go and search any of these ones HDRI heaven is quite good as well although this one's hundred percent free so it gives you a very realistic sky lighting so I'm just going to use one of the preset ones that I have and I'm just going to use a hasty right image that I used in the backyard course finally I guess I don't need the Sun lamp but what I'm going to do is I want to use the lighting from the HDR right directly so let's go to shading again and change this from object to world and I want to use the power of the Sun lamp as well so where's the Sun lamp in this case directly above okay so let's move this aside over here we're going to use converter mat node connected startled into this that's it multiply put that into strength and then I didn't another one shift B and one set add and I'd say one star we get a more realistic lighting finally I'll just go ahead and go shift s closer to world origin and I'll just add in a big plane like so okay and finally we'll bring in a camera like this and let's focus on our tree a little better okay and now for our tree we just enable the pilot system again yeah so this plane is somehow ended up in the clump right just come to the clump of branches collections let's do that out of that collection real quick and let's give this a render might increase the field of view of the camera 35 mil have a render of that one and see what that looks like and that's it I'll pretty much let you decide for yourself which one looks a whole lot more realistic and a whole lot more believable for your 3d projects is there something that you just generate straight out of the box as a lot of newer 3d artists tend to do when they figure out the sapling Adam for the first time or is it this approach where we actually take the time to plan out and find out the true characteristics of a realistic tree so now you can pretty much go ahead and try to fill your rain forests or landscapes with these trees and see which one looks a whole lot more realistic and a whole lot more believable I hope you found this video useful and if you enjoy this video and learned a lot please go ahead and like share and comment and also subscribe to this channel if you want to see more videos like this thanks for watching

Channel: Thilakanathan Studios

Views: 96,783

Keywords: blender 2.8 tree tutorial, blender trees tutorial, blender photorealism tutorial, blender realistic trees, 3D tree tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender tutorial, 3d tree modeling

Id: drTq5O3m-uA

Length: 50min 6sec (3006 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019