Hi everyone, I’m Nao, a solo developer based in Japan.
Since late last year I’ve been building Hibiki Trees, a Geometry Nodes tree generator for Blender focused on Japanese species. I wanted trees that feel right to people who actually live with them, rather than a generic “Japanese-style” look. It’s my own tool and I’m planning to release it in November, but I’d like to share the process here while it’s still being finished.
In Japanese gardens, momiji are usually favored in a light, airy form with slender branches, much like the way they grow in a forest. Here’s a Momiji made with Hibiki Trees:
So far there are five species: Kusunoki (camphor), Momiji (Japanese maple), Aodamo (Japanese ash), Manryo (Ardisia crenata) and Sakura (cherry, in bloom). Momiji and Aodamo come in both single-trunk and multi-stemmed versions.
Most of the work went into branching: the branch rotation axis, rounding the crown, child-branch thickness, and twig generation. The hardest part was getting each new branch, after a fork, to inherit the length accumulated along its parent branches. Honestly, I found working with fields in Geometry Nodes really hard to get my head around.
I also spent a lot of time photographing and observing real trees. Under the hood it’s a Core node group plus an Interface group, with one preset file per species. On top of that sits a small side panel for picking a species and adjusting a handful of shape and foliage controls, with a seed you can randomize.
I’d really value your feedback:
- Does anything in the crowns or branching look off to you?
- If you know any of these trees well, does something about their shape feel wrong?
- If you’ve tackled something similar with fields, like passing values down a branching structure, I’d be curious how you approached it.
I’ll post a closer look at each species here over the next few weeks. Thanks for looking.