I’m currently postponing my Flytrap project to work on an entry for the Blender Guru Christmas competition. I’m planning on creating a tree sale scene.
So far, this is all I have; a basic fir that I’ll be using in the scene (if enough people are interested in the sapling settings, I’d be happy to share them). Critiques are welcome!
awesome work man, thats pretty realistic. Id like those settings if your willing to share em! Are the needles (leafs) an alpha texture or can you make them like that from the sapling addon?
Thanks! I’ll share the settings soon (I’ll edit this post in a few minutes and add them, as I’m currently waiting for another render to finish). And the needles don’t have any textures; they’re just rectangular leaves directly from the sapling addon :yes:
EDIT: Okay, here are the settings. I’ve highlighted (or rather, put a red rectangle around) the settings that I changed so it’s easier to tell.
Obviously, the number of leaves and branches you use will depend on how much your computer can handle.
After this, I did have to do a bit of cleanup work (there were too many needles at the top of the tree and the bottom of the tree) by using a mix between the circle select tool and the “select random” feature, but other than that, it’s all done in sapling (minus materials and texturing). Hope this is useful to people!
EDIT (2):
Here’s my material node setup for the needles, in case anyone’s interested. It’s pretty simple, but I thought I’d share it anyway.
A Christmas tree…
It’s a Christmas tree…
Awesome job! Looks real to me. 
thanks for the tips man, those settings were kind of like a mini tutorial for me haha. Heres what I came up with after some tweaking.
Perfect settings for coniferous wood! Really cool.
did you add extra snow or only change color of the leaves?
look good
happy cycles
Thanks, everyone!
Knives, it looks really cool! Glad the settings were useful 
Here’s another small update. I tried adding some snow/frost to the needles.
Love
it
!
When did Sapling get this advanced? When I first used it it was terrible. And what’s the material on those needles?
The material for the needles on the second image is this:
Basically, for the image texture part, I created an image of the clouds texture (black and white, of course). Then I projected it onto the tree (from the top view), and used the image texture as a mask to combine the white “frost” shader with the initial needle shader.
Really nice stuff. Thanks for the info!
