Adding several leaf objects in sapling add tree

Hello,

I am creating a tree by using the sapling addon and I would like to apply different leaves to create color and shape variation. Is there a way to connect several custom mesh leaf objects to my tree? Right now I was able to connect only one type of mesh but I need to connect 3 more.

Thank you in advance for you help.

One way i can think of you create just with the standard leaf, then take the leaf and apply particle system on it and render from a collection.

@josie Hi there, I started tweaking, and found one solution. There might be another, in one shader, but I guess the best is to keep separate shaders.

You set up the tree with leaves, you add the separate types, but mind it is the same UV, so the scaling, etc… should match I guess. Then you simply Mix Shader, with a Random per Island as Factor. The color ramp there is to keep them hard apart, if you don’t use that, the rectangles will be different, but along the whole color range, which would not be fine having actual images.

Yet, if you tweak this solution, it can pretty much work :slight_smile:

@josie PS: as an extra touch, I am sure you can select faces, and paint them RGB colours, then use the RGB colours as an attribute factor, that you mix with the random. It means you could not only have random leaves anywhere, but you can also make e.g. orange leaves on the outer rim, while having green ones in the middle. I have house-work to do lol, so I cannot test it, but I’m 100% sure it would work as well. It is a great way to use the nice transparency leaf sets we can find online e.g. on CC0 textures (site was lately renamed).

So I urge you to tweek, the sappling tree might seem not-that-good, but with enough tweaking it is still one of the best and simplest ways to create trees in Blender. :slight_smile: