Kelly Ray J

I had a bit of time this afternoon and wanted to figure out how to make fluffy, witness-style trees. A couple of other people also wanted to know this, so here’s a little tutorial about it. As always, this is blender3D specific, but there’s probably a way to do it in your preferred software as well (I think it’s called something like normal thief in maya EDIT: try normal thief in 3ds Max, and transfer attribute in Maya. Thanks to @mellowTama for pointing this out!).

The trunk is pretty simple, just an extruded cylinder:

More interesting is the leaves

It’s pretty easy to guess that there’s a ton of transparently textured, semi-randomly placed planes in there and the shader’s nothing special - just unity’s standard standard+fade material,

with a pretty substandard leaf texture made with the airbrush in gimp.

And a bit of lighting foolery to make it look better.

BUT most importantly is normal editing on the leaf planes. Without, they look like this:

Not good.

The general idea behind normal editing here is that you want all of the normals to be pointing more or less “out” of the tree. Normals are normally (hah) the vector that lies perpendicular to the plane on which any given polygon lives; that’s what being a normal means. Changing them in this way more or less makes them be lighted as if each plane is on a sphere around the center of the leaf cluster.

The easiest way to do this in blender is to add the Normal Edit modifier like so.

And here we are! Nice fluffy leaves