I like to do forest images with lots of large close up tree trunks, but I got tired of the uniform strait up and down trunks I got using the terrain trick (or worse using just plain cylinders). Moreover, the trunks of off-the-shelf tree models have lousy bark textures that look awful when too close to the camera. Consequently, I decided to model my own tree trunk in Blender. I was going for the look of the lower part of a short leaf pine tree (common here in the north metro Atlanta area). Typically these trees are tall with only a few broken off limbs at the bottom two-thirds. I don�t really need the top third which is where the living branches, needles, and pine cones are, so I didn�t bother with that part. This is my first render using my tree trunk model. The tree was constructed in Blender, while the texture was done using Gimp. The final render was done using Vue (which is also what I used for the hill and sky). Post production work was done in Photoshop. Daniel Eskridge Saurischia.com