Texturing the tree trunk and creating realistic leaves

Now, we will deal with the tree of our scene. We will create the trunk and the leaves. For the leaves, we will again be working on instances that are located on a different layer than the main scene. The actual leaves on the tree are set to be displayed as Bounding Box to make the viewport easier to manage. In case you want to visualize the actual geometry of the leaves, you will have to select the original meshes on layer 5 and from the Object menu, select the Textured type from the Display panel. Note that even if the Bounding Box type is selected, the leaves will appear as usual when using the real-time viewport, so it is a good idea to leave the display type to Bounding Box.

Getting ready

First, we will create the bark material for the tree. Let's select the tree mesh and hit / on the numeric keypad to go into the local mode and solo the object in the viewport. This will allow us to have a much more responsive real-time viewport...