How to Fake a Large Scale Forest in Blender | Part 1
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange answerers point people to it for the billboard-tree technique, where a rendered tree image and its normal map are used as a lightweight stand-in for full 3D foliage.
Recommended by 3 people across 3 different months, 2018 to 2022.
What it is
A 35-minute Blender tutorial by Zacharias Reinhardt of CG Boost on faking a large forest cheaply. It covers generating a 3D tree with The Grove add-on, rendering it to an image, and turning it into an alpha-channel billboard tree with volume, back lighting and random leaf colour effects.
What people said
Strong rec Bruno · 2018-02 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How can I create a normal map that points 90 degrees upward from a flat surface?”
Normal maps are not necessarily for adding detail but to change the way light falls on the surface. Here is a quick example of changed normal map without changing the detail using the Normal node: [LINK] Here is an alternative with the normal map generated dynamically by calculating the direction between the object and the light ( Can I refer to another object's properties from a Cycles node shader? Drivers? If so, how? [LINK] ): [LINK] [LINK] Watch this excellent tutorial by Zacharias Reinhardt [this video] in a nutshell, you have to create your full object with material first render it in ortho on a square plane generate normal map and color texture for this square projection use the normal and
Recommends jo gogo · 2019-06 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Diffuse bake alpha”
I think i found solution, or rather Zacharias Reinhardt from yt. Simple way to render instead of baking foliage bilboards. No black alpha outline will be seen. [this video] Other method would be to model HP plant without alpha for baking bilboards. You can add it for other LODs.
Recommends Blunder · 2022-06 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “best way to create tree billboard”
... oh, the video is already linked in Crantisz's link but I leave it here. It's How to Fake a Large Scale Forest in Blender / Part 1 [this video] . With the Sapling add-on you can create a tree, then render out the images for the billboard. The normal map makes it interact with light.
Cites Savage Sauron · 2019-03 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Removing Alpha Channel in Node Editor”
five month old newbie who's having some fun, here. I've been experimenting a bit, and got a problem. I was following this tutorial from Zacharias Reinhardt on how to create massive background forests via alpha channels. Seems to me to be the best method there is, if you're aiming for not too much processing. [this video] And then I got stuck in the node editor when removing the black alpha channel part of the png. I'm 99% certain I did everything exactly like Zacharias showed in the tutorial, but somehow, I'm getting a somewhat different result? And yes, RGBA was selected during export of the original file. I've added a screenshot of the section in the tutorial and a screenshot of what I've got o