Doing trees can be frustrating and time consuming but with a bit of practice and experimenting you can achieve pretty good results and with the knowledge you did it yourself.Picking or shooting a suitable photo can make your life easy or hard.If you have the luxary of the tree freestanding against a evenly shaded background then your job is already half done.

As you can probably guess the gum tree at the top was easier to do than the one underneath.I had to do a copy and mirror flip paste to cover up the shed as well as the alpha bit.With the gum tree I sampled the colour of the sky about halfway to the horizon and started to fill in the background.You can use bucket fill set for similar colours to speed up the process but watch your tolerance as you may fill something you want to keep.The image below needs cleaning up. Notice the black specks along the edges (b)and has a couple of spots to fill in (a).Watch the area (c) as this is shadow not a area to fill. I deliberetly filled with black first to help illustrate the edge issues.

The image below is almost ready for a test run. There is a fair amount of testing and experimenting to get the edges looking clean and good. If I wasn't in a huge hurry I would spend a bit more time on this image to get it just right. You will have to fix the bits where it is a lighter blue or they stand out like anything. You can use colour select at this stage with a higher tolerance and pick up more of the blue edges,then fill the whole selection, flatten and see how it went. The idea is to have a background with uniform colour(pref light/sky blue in this case).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you are happy use the select by colour tool with a tolerance of about 5 (You will have to experiment with this setting)with antialiasing and feather edges selected and select, once,anywhere on the blue area.Now.. invert the selection, copy and paste(ctrl c, ctrl v without moving your mouse) and open the layers dialogue

Add a new layer and make the original layer invisible.Your image should look something like the one below.The blue edges are still not too good but you can get away with it against a blue sky.The blue is partly in the tree itself as the sky blue is contributing to the colour of the branches and leaves.If you increase the tolerance of colour select you will reduce the blue edge effect but may lose some of the finer edge detail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now save this image as a .tga to keep the alpha information and uvmap this texture onto a plane making sure the alpha and the halo(ensures the plane always faces the camera)setting is enabled in the editing window (F9). Voila you should have a tree .I probably had 2-3 goes at this before I was happy with the one you see in the train game. Remember to save often as a .xcf file to preserve all aspects of your work.

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