Hi all. I am wondering if anyone can help me. What is the best way to create a realistic apple tree in carrara. Can it be done in the plant modeller and if so how?? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Hello benney! What's about this one: https://sharecg.com/v/92744/browse/5/3D-Model/Plant-08-fruit-tree-Carrara-procedural. Can be a good start to get into this stuff.

Thanks for that. I'll check it out and let you know :-)

I'd say depends on how detailed and closeup you need it. There is definitely a way to do this procedurally, but if you need a very good realistic closeups you might want to mix a procedural tree with better sculpted branches grouped together. For the procedural part: You can add fruit as leaves variations or use a replicator on one of the branch levels as the shader-driven replication.

You can definitely model a more realistic apple (or other fruit/flower) to substitute for some of the leaves. Adding to what Antaran says (waves Hi to Antaran!), you can also model full branch/leaf/fruit combinations and load as "leaves" in the plant modeler. I believe that the default uvmap for the Carrara plant modeler trunk and branches has dimensions of 3:1. So if you create procedural shaders or tiled trunk/branch texture maps, you may get better results using height to width tiling to 3:1 or 1:3 when applied to trees created with the plant modeler. The other tip I would give for the plant modeler is to look in the leaves tab for the place to adjust the weights of individual "leaves." That is where you can adjust how dense the fruit coverage is compared to the foliage.