The Oak

Thank you Alexey. The trees I got from Xfrog all have rectangular leaves, not bent. That's probably why they were free. Because I have transparency for cutting out the leaf form, it's difficult to add more transparency. A bit of bump would have been good, it didn't occur to me. I know about the shadow casting on the terrain but I hadn't thought of putting a light source beneath. Good idea! The HDRI used is too weak on the underside. The link to your tree shows mesh leaves which certainly have many polygones and look natural, not like a sheet of paper mine have.

* A good experiment, Horo. I beg to differ with you regarding leaves. Some of the leaves look very good. Much depends on the configuration of the material, Bump and lighting. http://www.bryce5.com/details.php?image_id=5278 What really is a problem because it is a dark flip side of the leaves. You can solve this problem by using the method of Rashad. You must disable "Cast Shadows" in the terrain material. In this case, the light of HDRI will illuminate from the bottom side of leaves (simulation of light reflected from the ground). You can still beneath the surface of the earth to put an additional light source. The second way is to make the leaves partially transparent. It is also possible to combine both methods. Only X-Frog trees have a lot of polygons. Therefore, the presence in the scene of several different trees too increases the file size and memory usage.

What I don't like are the leaves. They are not proper meshes, only flat rectangles using the picture material to give them shape. No problems if placed at some distance from the camera, but this is exactly what I wanted to test: close-up.

X-Frog trees are excellent. I am not convinced however that they are always the best. I'd say here that the fruit really adds a nice level of detail to the model. If only the branches and stems were less perfect these trees would look quite natural.

Thank you, Trish.

This turned out really nice!!