Looks nice so far! Much quicker to tweak.
I’d like to show you a quick experiment I attempted tonight. It’s obviously only a test so far, but I wanted to see if it could be used in this type of scene.
First, I rendered out a few maps of a tree. I had to use a custom node setup to get a good camera normal map.
I then created a geometry nodes setup to displace cards and point them towards the camera. It’s pretty much the old leaf card setup with displacement.
I then added a bit of randomness, and created a simple material and lighting setup. Here’s the end result:
Cycles:
Eevee:
To put this in perspective, it was minimal time, minimal settings, and minimal effort. It’s only like 15 seconds worth of samples, and I’m pretty happy with the result. Though it’s not the best close-up, it would be great for environment concepts when you have to scatter thousands of trees on a mountain for instance.
The next step would be to somehow automate variations, possibly through animated seeds and the compositor. The only issue would be keeping track of all the maps, and randomizing them in the card setup itself. I’ll probably look into sprite sheets of some type, and see where that gets me. What are your thoughts?