Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook - Third Edition

Creating tree shaders – the bark

There are several different ways to make trees in a 3D package: starting from the simpler low-poly objects, such as the billboards used in video games (simple planes mapped with tree images on a transparent background), to middle complex objects where a trunk mesh is attached to a foliage mass made of little alpha textured planes, each one representing a leaf or even a twig, to more complex and heavy meshes, where every little branch and leaf is actually modeled.

In case you need them, you can find several free tree models in the Blender format and also their billboard versions at http://yorik.uncreated.net/greenhouse.html.

For this two-part tree shader recipe, we will instead use a model coming from the many environment ...