Texturing a tree in blender

Question

I have created a tree in blender with the curve sapling add-on. Then I have converted the log's curve in a mesh and I have combined that with the leaves mesh. I have tried to create a normal UV map, but bleander crashes 'cause too many vertices. So I need to create an uv map, where I draw the log texture and ONE texure for all the leaves. How can I create it? Thank you and sorry for my bad English

Answer 1

Are your trunk and leaves merged into a single mesh? If that is the case it will be tough to texture.

You might want to look into using a hair particle system to distribute a single leaf model or group of leaves onto your trunk model. That way you can create just one leaf and texture that, or a small set of leaves, and the particle system will take care of the distribution on the tree trunk for you based on weight painting the vertices you want to distribute leaves to. I've been using hair particle systems a lot lately for doing large distributions of sets of objects. Haven't used it for leaves on a tree yet, but it works well for making a set of trees into a forest, or a set of buildings into a city scape, so I think it would work for what you need on the trees.

Answer 2

What I did when I made a fir was to create a tree with three levels and max sized leaves (about 6-10 of them per twig). I then used a twig texture with alphachannel as a texture for the leaves. Using some additional Translucency gave very decent results for semi-near and midrange trees.

Additionally, a subsurf of level 3 and displacement with a cloud texture gives some additional depth to the leaf-twigs.