Now we're going to create the leaves in Sasquatch.

This part assumes you have a certain familiarity with Sasquatch Fur.

First we need to make some surfaces for the fur-leaves to grow from. Make three nested spheres around the origin in a new layer. For my 13 meter tree, I made my largest a .8 meter radius and a level 3 tessellated sphere, the other two 0.56 m and a 0.3 m level 2 tessellated spheres. Then cut off the bottom 1/3rd. This should provide a dense enough mesh to fill the tree with leaves. Actually too dense, but we'll optimize it later.

leaf holding object

Now we need to put this leaf holding object on the ends of the branches. We'll do this with Point Clone Plus+ (though there are other options, feel free...) Lasso select the outside edges of the tree in all three profiles. Copy these polygons to a new layer, kill the polys to leave only the points and then merge points with an absolute distance until there's a decent number left. On my tree 0.6 m gave me 112 points, which should be enough. You may want more or less depending on the type of tree you're looking for, and how big your leaf holding object is.

selecting the branches

Next run Point Clone Plus+. The settings are up to you. You want to keep the settings under control so you fill up the leafy space pretty well, but random enough that it doesn't look too repetitive.

Sample Point Clone Plus+ settings

After Point Clone Plus+ (I changed the color of the leaf supporting polygons for moral support. The color is irrelevant as the polygons are not going to be rendered)

Still looks cartoony, right? Apply some jitter to the leaves. 0.20 m of gaussian jitter gives me this:

Starting to look like a tree...

Which I like because it retains a bit of the shape from the source objects. You can however use more or less depending on how well defined you want the leaf area of the tree.

This is probably another very good time to save the tree.

If you hit "w" and look at the statistics, you might be alarmed at the number of polygons. If you are, then this might be a good time to break out your favorite polygon reduction plugin (say, qemLOSS2 for example) and reduce away. Remember you will want to keep enough polys in it to have a full leafy tree. Also removing too many polygons can provide unwanted hard edges to the leaves, though this can be minimized by only reducing the polygons in the middle of the tree.

Now load it into Layout. Turn on the Sasquatch pixel filter plugin and turn "Rearward Polygon Quality" up to 100%. This is because we're going to see right through the polygons, so the leaves better darn well grow on the back side...

To make sure we don't see them, turn off the rendering of the polygons by setting the polygon size to 0, setting object dissolve to 100% (just to be thorough). I also turned off all shadow and seen by rays options. It'll help speed up rending by a small amount.

Now that you can see the woody parts clearly, it might be time to surface the woody parts. I did a quick job using a multi-layer crumple procedural on color, diffuse and bump channels, stretched on the Y axis. Again, this is a good place to experiment. A lot depends on what you want your tree to look like.

Surface Editor

Now it's time to apply Sasquatch Fur. Apply the Sasquatch displacement plugin to the leaf holding object. If you change nothing you get this:

Tree looks a little too furry.

Which is interesting, but not what we're after. Or I'm after at least...

The first things to change is the color. Green for spring and summer, get creative for the fall. (Cranking up Hue Vary can give some very interesting results, especially for a fall tree.) The next thing is to turn down the length (they start at 1.05 m long for my tree, a bit too long for me. I also cranked the Coarseness (ie: width) up to 750% and turned the Fiber Divisions down to 0 (to speed up rendering) and turned off Clumping and Friz.

Here's what it looks like:

First try at leaves.

Hmmm... Not so good. First of all the fur is too fine and way too dense. It also looks like fur and not leaves. After increasing the length, decreasing the density (to around 3% or so), and changing the surface settings to look more like leaves (primarily cutting down specularity and translucent lighting) I get this:

Tree looks a little too furry.

Still some problems. You can see some of the spheres that hold the leaves. I probably should have made my original leaf object a bit more dense (for example put another sphere or two inside it) but a quick trip to Modeler cleans up gets rid of most of the offending polygons. Also turning on a small amount of clumping can help hide the polygon edges.

Turning on shadow options for the pixel filter (at least self shadow and cast shadow--be sure to put the Sas shadow filter on your tree and ground surfaces!) really helps with the realism.

Starting to shape up.

 

A bit more tweaking, and drop it on a little hill and we get these:

Render time: 40 seconds, PIII 750 (14 seconds without the grass)	Or turn the clock forward to fall...	Or put six of them on a hill (render time 74 seconds)

 
This technique scales very well. I've done scenes with up to 100 trees which take less than 10 minutes to render.

Okay, that's it! I hope I've given you enough information to start on your own trees.
If so (or if not!) I'd be interested in any comments you have on this tutorial, and I'd love to see any images you create with it! Let me know!

Where to go from here?
Well, there's lots of places, but I can think of two good ones. The first is wind. Rather than using Sasquatch's built in wind (which would only flutter the leaves and not give the sense that the branches are moving) run a displacement map through the leaf object. This effect will be best for gentle breezes. View a quick sample Quicktime movie here. You can probably get more realistic dynamics if you put more work into it than I did (more than 45 seconds). If you use very long, dangly strands of fur, you can get an excellent weeping willow, (in which case using Sasquatch wind dynamics is very helpful.)
The second is looking at using Sasquatch on the tree branches to create small twiggy branches. I have only taken the first steps at approaching this technique, so I can't recommend it yet, but it does seem very promising.

Oh yeah, email me with spelling corrections too...