The tree leaves

After all the journey to model and texture the tree itself, the time has come to finish It adding some branches and leaves!

I started with a reference panel; in fact, several reference panels. My first idea was to make redish cherry blossom flowers, I had a full board with real life images. Then I changed my mind and decided to make WHITE cherry blossom flowers. I did start to paint some and I basically hated all of them. Started It all over again and decided to make maple leaves. I finished them, looks really nice for this isolated project, but I'll probably make some changes for the final Diorama, because I'm going for a more ethereal, sacred enviroment and I want to play with different colors and maybe make some flowers anyway.

After I had all the references, I started painting some leaves. Funny fact here: when I first started to paint the cherry blossom, It took me about TWO HOURS to finish ONE SINGLE FLOWER. That's because I'm a very insecure digital painter. I thought It would take me ages to start It all over again with the maple leaves, but turns out It took me 10 minutes to create de leaves! I don't even know how that happened. I made three different leaf colours because I wanted to make colorful branches, but at the end I decided to make a single color tree, and maybe experiment more later when I have more time.

And then It was time to dress the branch!! I had some advice from a third year, and she told me to go for a more "stuffed" branch, so I wouldn't have to create many planes to get a nice tree with many leaves. I cheated a little bit and used the tree texture to make the branch and just modified a couple of things. At the end I had this very chunky nice branch!

When I finished the branch I realised my file was much bigger than It should have been for the texture. I had a 1000x1000 image when I needed a 256x256. So I had to rescale everything and was really frustrated with the quality loss. I also painted textures for the door and the little cut-off part of my tree! I still don't know how to pack textures so I can use in different elements, In fact I don't even know If that's possible, but I had a lot of extra space on the door texture.

I am really happy with the final result, even though the tree doesn't have the feeling I was going for in the beggining, I'm proud of myself. I think I would make some changes and even though using a tileable texture is way easier and more effective for this kind of project, I wish I could have used a whole texture, so I could make some details to the bark, add some light coming out of the door holes and reflecting on the tree.