Hey Reader,

Martin here,

If you want to make a large, ambitious scene but your PC struggles to render those precious pixels, this new tutorial is for you.

Five years ago, Zach made a tutorial on how to turn 3D trees, into fast rendering 2D billboards (that still look 3D-ish), to fill big scenes with millions of particles, to create large forests.

However, with Blender 3.0 lots of things have changed. And while still usable, Zach’s tutorial became a little outdated.

Since then, there were many requests to remake the tutorial, to work with the latest versions of our favorite open-source software.

Today, we answer those requests. But since I'm the environment guy here at CG Boost, I will walk you through the process this time, instead of Zach.

We will make lightweight 2D particles out of 3D assets and use some shading tricks to retain the 3D look.

In fact, I've used this approach on various assets, not just trees.

Why? To save computing power and render massive particle counts in Blender. It's smart, versatile, and you're going to love it.

By the way, my course at CG Boost covers a lot more environment creation techniques. I've poured all my knowledge into it, and since its release, over 7000 students benefited from it.

​If you're interested, check it out here​

Stay creative!

~Martin