Vegetation
We have already looked briefly at vegetation in Chapter 3, Composing the Scene, and talked about how important it is for the effectiveness of a visual. Hopefully, you have already included some great vegetation in your scene by cutting 2D billboards from photos. However, for some applications, especially when aiming for an animated output, you might need some other vegetation.
Non-photoreal sketchy trees
In non-photoreal scenes, cartoon-style trees look great. You can create these easily yourself by starting with a tree photo and tracing around it as you've just done with the person.
The following image is an example of a sketchy tree. Have a go at making one now from a photo. Then, follow the earlier steps to create a face-me component:
Want an automatic veggie maker?
RPTree Maker from Render Plus allows you to generate 2D trees from within SketchUp and place them into the model. It saves a PNG with alpha mask on a 2D face-me component. The alpha mask is a black–and-white image...
