Open 3d tree recommendations

[dlparisi]

I'm trying to find a good street tree that I can include in a rendering that doesn't completely block the building behind it. Nothing to big too. Everything I have is just too filled in for use in an image where the focus is the buildings. Does anyone have any recommendations of either a single tree purchase or in a collection? Thanks.

[Morne]

How about deleted a couple of branches and leaves on your existing trees?

[dlparisi]

Thanks Morne. That's basically what I ended up doing although I wish there was a good way to remove a branch and a all of it's associated leaves. I basically deleted a few of the branches and then randomly selected 50% of the leaves and deleted them.

[tricky]

Possibly too late, but how about adding a larger 'matte' to the leaf textures. In effect, this would make all the leaves smaller and the tree more transparent.

Any help?

[Sawyer]

I usually render in 2 "passes". I turn the trees off to camera in the main pass but they render in reflections and shadows. Then I re-render just the trees with everything else hidden and comp them in photoshop and then I can change the opacity as I need.

[dlparisi]

Possibly too late, but how about adding a larger 'matte' to the leaf textures. In effect, this would make all the leaves smaller and the tree more transparent.

Any help?

Yeah, it helps a little to get the look I'm after but the problem is that in order to make the tree less opaque I end up with really small leaves that look OK when they're all clumped together but at the edges of the tree there are these small dots that are the leaves. I actually combined this with my editing above and just shrunk the leaf a little bit, both together gave me what I was looking for.

I usually render in 2 "passes". I turn the trees off to camera in the main pass but they render in reflections and shadows. Then I re-render just the trees with everything else hidden and comp them in photoshop and then I can change the opacity as I need.

I'm not a big fan of either re-rendering a scene to get the trees separate or the transparent tree look. It always looks a little too artificial to me.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.