CREATE A STYLISED TREE

01 work out your Style

The first thing that you should do is decide on the style that you’re trying to achieve and then assemble the parts you need. For this tree, I used three merged splines inside a sweep, using the detail graph to make the sweep large at the top (end growth). Three merged spheres make the canopy and then I added varying materials to four discs and a platonic (to later become the fruit).

02 Select the leaves AND fruit

Select your leaves and fruit in the object manager, hold [Alt] and add a cloner to the scene (which makes the objects a child of the cloner). Now in the Cloner’s attributes, set the type to Object and drag the Canopy into the Object field, as in the image. By default you will have clones attached to the canopy, grown at each vertex of the underlying geometry.

03 Adjusting the composition

While I’m happy with the placement, (you could try setting the Distribution to surface for more coverage) I think it would be better to have the fruit hanging nearer the bottom of the canopy, so in the Object tab of the Clone, change the Clones dropdown menu so it says Blend. This works on the hierarchy of your nested clones, so make sure the fruit is at the bottom of the stack.

04 further trees

Trees are rarely on their own, so when you build more, follow the same guide, varying the canopy spheres and moving points on the trunk spline. Adding the completed tree to a cloner, with a random effector set to scale and rotation can let you build a wood very quickly. Nested cloners can be very useful. You could also add specific props, like the swing hanging from the branches in my example.