Gumroad takes way less from the sellers and in case you release with an introductory price it will definitely be the best for both you and us.
You can then have it at full price if it takes too long to release on Blendermarket.
Or maybe you can have different pricing as many developers do between BM and Gumroad.
Personally I have no preference.
Great, thanks for the advice!
Iām probably not going to have different pricing for the different sites, mainly because I really like Blender Market, and donāt want to take away from their sales (or the dev fund).
So Iāve now published the product on Gumroad:
It should already have a 25% discount applied (original price is $35), but if not, just enter the code āearlybirdā at the checkout and it should apply!
Maybe try contacting blender market and ask them if approvement process can be speed up. They are really nice. If you explain your problem they might help you.
Great work. Keep it up.
Thanks for the info, but I think they are just genuinely out of office over Christmas and so itās not really possible to speed up. Thanks anyway 
Itās finally arrived! The product is now live on Gumroad and Blender Market:
Iāve also released a quick tutorial on getting started with the addon:
(This is my first attempt at something like this so any feedback would be really appreciated)
Itās taken a while, but now itās done I can get back to updating the addon (Geometry nodes is the next big thing 
)
As always, thanks for all the support and if you have any questions, just ask 
Hey Andrew, great addon, just bought it on Blender Market, I love what you have done. Just a quick question in Cycles, how do we get rid of all the black frames from the planes that are generated?
Edit Nevermind, just raised the transparency in the light paths area.
Yeah, I think Iām going to make that change automatically when you add a particle system because it can be a bit unintuitive to figure out for the first time
Andrew Can I ask for a feature in some update in the future? Is there a way to add a toggle to lower on the Z axis the trees if it is possible. I know the addon Scatter has that. The trunks all look to aligned if you get my gist. For distance, it is not relevant, but for some closeups, it looks fake.
Just for the record, you have already sliced my time in Half, and am immeasurably greatful for your work, I havenāt even addressed rendering time, wow, this took 2 minutes to render, with minimal effort. but I had to ramp up to about 99 on transparency.
Yeah, thatās a good idea! I could probably try and add it in the next update.
In the meantime, If you want to improve in your scene, you could try adding another biome with a smaller scale. then make them only appear at the back and it should break up that straight line a bit.
You could also try editing the tree object inside the particle collection to remove the trunk, but thatās a little more involved:
Hope that helps!
(Also, thanks for the encouragement, it really helps to see that the addon is helping people!)
Update time!
Iāve added two new options for trees in particle systems: width and z-offset (as suggested by @Vesper! ). These two make it really easy to create ground foliage like bushes:
https://gfycat.com/foolishignorantchameleon
Individual imported trees have also had an update so that now they can share materials, track to a camera, and copy all of these settings between each other:
https://gfycat.com/elaboratephysicalambushbug
Iāve also been working a lot on just finishing up all the loose ends that were leftover from before the release, for example, Iāve updated the UI to be more consistent and a little easier to use. Iāve also improved the icons so that the tree icons now use the material previews, which means that they will update to show an accurate representation of the material:
It can result in some squashing of textures, but I think itās worth it for making it easier to find specific trees, and you can always turn it off in the preferences (They have also been improved)
Apart from that, Iāve also just added a bunch of little improvements:
+ a bunch of QOL and behind the scenes stuff 
(I canāt update the product page just yet, but it should be live by tomorrow morning)
Quick update, the store pages have now been updated to the latest release, so if youāve bought it, you should be able to download it now!
Also, I know that itās probably a little late, but Iāve finally got round to making a proper trailer video:
It was actually pretty fun to make, but it took a while.
I LOVE it. Thanks a lot!
One Question: is there a chance to move the trees a little? Maybe dump question, but I donāt get it. (I know - the trees are ājustā 2d plates, so there is not much space for moving anyway, but little would help).
Thanks!
Do you mean as in animating the leaves, or the tree as a whole?
I do plan on adding both of those features at some point in the future, but they slow down rendering a fair bit, so it could be a while. Otherwise, if you are using a particle system, you could fake it a little bit by animating the ārandom rotationā value to maybe give them a bit of sway.
And if you really wanted to, you could modify the material by distorting the image vector with a noise texture and animating that. (Though thatās a fair bit of work, and is quite advanced. Let me know if you want to do this and I could give you a hand).
Sorry if thatās a bit wordy, I hope it helped
Billboard technologies have great potential for cinematic detail into the horizon. Blender needs lots of love and attention in this regard, and Andrew seems to be an excellent python programmer and an artist to boot.
I like how this implementation pays attention to normals and translucence.
There is another addon, that takes rotation into account. This can provide more variation in general, and perhaps, be more usable with distant buildings. I have to test it:
The billboard/imposter systems get even more advanced with āOctahedral Impostorsā or āVolumetric Billboardsā paper, the motherlode of them all:
Though the latter, would require core rendering support in Blender.
Here is an old video we did using billboards for most of the grass:
We are hoping in the future, those billboards (and their artifacts) can be pushed towards the horizon, and close up replaced with full geometry.
Wow, thanks for reaching out, this is some really good stuff!
Especially the Imposter Baker addon, I had never seen it before! There are some really nice optimizations in there that Iāll want to try and implement, like reducing transparency by making the origin off centre.
I had actually looked into baking from multiple angles before, but I never managed to get a material that was convincing enough, so thatās a real goldmine! I also like the idea of packing all of the angles into one texture, because otherwise I was worried that the file sizes would get way too big.
āOctahedral impostersā also seem very interesting! I did a quick search and found this article on using them in UE4, that goes really in-depth to explain them:
Whether or not I could implement the technique into blender though is another matter, as it is quite advanced, and has a very interesting shader that may not be possible to recreate.
Thanks for the pointers though, this could be very useful for improving the addon!
Hey, just got the addon a few days ago. I canāt seem to create an Alpha from imported Evermotion trees even though it meets all the checklist criteria. Iām consistently getting an error saying it āCanāt find materials for branches, leaves, or fruit. Canāt split mesh.ā. Iāve assigned the correct corresponding materials so Iām not sure whatās going on here. Does the Alpha Creator only work with Botaniq?
Hi, thatās a pretty weird bug. That error was written a while ago, so itās a bit misleading, what it means is that those materials arenāt applied to any geometry on the tree mesh. The addon uses these materials to split the mesh into two objects that can be rendered on different layers, so if the materials arenāt applied to any geometry, it canāt split the mesh, and the process fails.
So make sure that the materials are actually applied to some of the mesh, and see if it works then.
If it still doesnāt work, do you think you could upload a blend file with the tree in it? Iāve never used Evermotion trees, so Iām not sure how they work.
Hope that helps!
Yeah, I tried again in Blenderās default new scene but got the same error. All the materials are applied, so, Iām still baffled. I couldnāt upload the file in my reply for some reason, but you can download a copy of it here.
