Alpha Trees 2.2 out now!
This update brings Scatter5 integration, updates to the weight layers engine, and a full rewrite of the preset system!

See the release post for a full list of changes: here

Tired of 50 hour render times for nature scenes?
3D tree models are slow

Traditional tree models often have millions of polygons, and multiple complex materials, making them very slow to render. They also slow down the viewport and add to visual noise while working.

They also use a lot of memory

Another problem with having all of those polygons and textures is that they can add up and overload the memory limits of your GPU, resulting in having to render on the CPU, which is often 5 to 10x slower.

Use Alpha Trees to render 10x the no. of trees 10x as fast
Billboards are much faster

Alpha Trees uses flat tree cards to speed up rendering and lower memory usage. Each tree card only has 4 vertices, drastically increasing performance when compared to the millions usually found in 3D tree models.

Just as realistic as 3D trees

The tree cards use an advanced material that allows them to react to lighting and translucency.

This means that they can still look 3D, without needing the extra geometry.

speed

Trees that are outside the camera’s field of view are automatically culled to reduce memory and render times. If they still use too much memory, you can choose the quality from high (2k) to low (256p), reducing memory usage by a further 64x.

Made for any hardware

All promotional images for Alpha Trees were rendered on a 4-year-old laptop GPU with the minimum recommended VRAM for cycles (2GB). Rendering these images on the same hardware using 3D tree models would simply not be possible.

But wait, there’s more!
Versatile material

Each tree can be customized using the material, allowing you to change everything from color, randomness and translucency all the way to number of dead leaves, the color of the trunk and the amount of snow lying on it.

~150 builtin trees

The Addon comes with a rich library of premade trees, including ~70 deciduous trees, ~50 coniferous trees, and ~20 small trees and shrubs. You can also easily search through the library by name, species, size, or tags to find exactly what you want quickly.

v2.2 – 02/07/22

Added full scatter integration
Added 5 new weight layers: Normalize, Is inside mesh, Clamp, Camera cull and Blur, allowing for even more fine control over the scale and distribution of the trees.
Updated the weight layers UI for Alpha Trees to be much more intuitive to use.
Updated the preset system to be more powerful and easy to use with the new system
Added three high quality preset biomes: Mediterranean pine scrub, European broadleaf forest and Spruce woodland, which can be added to your scene with just a few clicks
Added a new method for editing and viewing biome presets
Fixed many bugs including but not limited to:
Camera tracking for single trees will now work instead of causing an error
reloading previews will now actually reload the tree previews
If a tree in the scene isn’t found in the current library, a more helpful error is shown
Fixed moving the order of adjustments in weight layers messing up
Updated the documentation to cover all new subjects, and also better cover the existing ones.