Quick Hedges Guidance

[Hook_Mason]

Hi all,

Apologies if this is in the wrong place!

I’ve been using blender for Archiviz for a while and am thoroughly hooked on the workflow, I use Archicad to create a BIM model and this now can be fully imported into blender for stunning visuals.

There is one element of this workflow that has caused me some thought over the years and I am curious to see what solutions or options there may be out there;

When exporting the BIM model, I usually have areas of bushes/vegetation which are modelled as simple cubes / polygons. This is great for BIM as it keeps the model lean but for visuals they look horrendous.

I typically delete and insert better HQ models, but this is tedious and takes some time.

I have had some success applying a ghosted foliage material to the cubes with some deformation to get them to look like vegetation,

I wonder if this can be taken further? what would be the best way of converting simple cubes into convincing hedges ?

Any ideas or solutions will be much appreciated!

[etn249]

Welcome!

I would model a small bundle of leaves, then use geometry nodes to replace the cube with a bunch of those leaves.

Here is the scene.
hedge_maker.blend (638.2 KB)

Once you have the setup, you can just apply it to any object and instantly turn it into leaves. It has pretty good performance, as the leaves are instances. But still, it has its limits if you have lots of objects, but you can disable the modifier’s viewport visibility and have it happen only at render.