Quote - A quick question: Does anyone know where I can find tutorials in document format for the new stuff in 2.64?

Just a heads-up - we're on to 2.64a now - there's been some significant bug fixes.

Documentation. That IS the challenge. The approach I've taken is to go with what has been published in that new Blender basics book first (for the core stuff about 2.5x - which includes 2.6x), then start to haunt BlenderArtists.org and watch pertinent tutorials on BlenderCookie. I soundly dislike video tutorials as a rule because:

-- the information flits past so quickly, you can't look at it, contemplate it, assimilate it
-- some of the people making videos are just incredibly difficult to listen to, for a variety of reasons
-- videos are hard to bookmark
-- some videographers don't tell you what they did, they show you steps minus keystrokes
-- for some, a gig download video on dialup is not even feasable (especially for just a few gems of info)

So, I completely agree with the DOCUMENT format notion of tutorials: I learn best that way myself. Saying that, there are some gugus (like David Ward and Jonathan Williamson) who use tools available in Blender that actually displays keystrokes on the screen in rolling-movie-credit style in a central yet unused section of the screen, which has actually served to show me a few things about Blender I didn't know before. And something things are just more efficiently demonstrated in video than document (picture tells a thousand words).

However, these are the better instrtuctors... and even they succumb to the "wait, no, that's... no, that's not right, actually, oh yeah, I remember now, it's..." - edit those videos, guys!!! Gotta remember, since it is in video format, one inevitably has to stumble past that fluff/brain-frump/cute-opinion section to get to the meat, unlike with a pdf where you can go straight to what you're after, and those little glitches get old real quick.

Actually, at the moment, I'm sort-of there with you, Agent. I need to get clear in my mind again how to instance a low poly leaf onto a 'sapling' tree using particles. The core information to doing this was provided by Marcos_Ita over at BlenderArtists.org:

Weight paint is kinda crazy onto trees, that's why i looked for another way. Nothing new or revolutionary though:

• Set up your tree as you like with Sapling, with visible leaves and hexagonal form
• Select leaves, edit mode-->edge select-->select all(A)--->press x and click dissolve. Now we have all the leaves hexagonal and ngons.
• Open UV editor, while leaves are selected--> press "u" in 3d window--> reset. Now all the leaves are on top of each other in UV editor and are aligned perfectly.
• In UV editor, keeping edit mode and UV editor in sync enabled, select with border select the bottom vert of the hexagon (he kind-of forgot to say you have to go back to vertex mode, but I figured it out eventually - I guess that's implied - he also forgot to mention that in the UV editor you sort-of have to click the "Keep UV And Edit Mode Mesh Selection In Sync" button in order for this to work). Now you (have) selected automatically all the verts which are lying on the branches.
• In 3d window invert the selection to delete the other verts.

Now we got a certain number of verts lying nicely on the branches and you can use them with a particle system.
My settings were: Hair - advanced - numbers equal to the number of verts (doing so i have an instance per each vertex)
Play with random rotation and scale in particles options.
Done. Is it clear? It's quite fast. Keep in mind of course, your custom leaf mesh must have its origin in the right place, otherwise your leaves will "grow" badly.

But there is more to it - now, it's about getting the tools in particles section to all play together to get those leaves all looking right.

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

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