> The leaves of the trees need to be a bit deeper red, I think:

Yes, I thought so too, when I was tweaking the image. But when I tried it,
the entire image started looking too dark. Camera exposure matters a lot,
too. I looked at a lot of reference photos, and saw that a very brightly
lit red looks pink. Even the second image you linked to shows a color in
the top branches very close to my image. I went with the color I thought
was most aesthetically pleasing, overall. Though in retrospect, it should
have been a shade or two darker. That's one of the flaws. :)

> I'm assuming, of course, these are japanese maples. Feel free to strike
> me down if that was not your intent.

Well, yes and no. I was more aiming towards a New England style young maple,
though the original xfrog model is indeed a japanese maple. Looking at the
reference photos though, I found that Japanese Maples come in an
astonishing variety of different leaf shapes and colors. They vary as much
as humans do. :)

As for varying the colors of the leaves more, I agree. Unfortunately I don't
know how to do that without vastly increasing the memory requirements for
the scene. In the image each leaf is a single polygon, and each one is an
instance of a single image map of a maple leaf. It's all the same leaf,
copied over and over. In addition, all the trees are in fact the same
identical tree, instanced. I had to do it that way to get the scene to fit
in the 96 megs of RAM I have.

I would love to be able to vary the color of each leaf slightly, in a sort
of gradient pattern as in that second photo (perhaps with a transparent top
layer of pigment on top of the imagemap?), but I don't know how to do this
efficently (or at all). If anyone knows, I'd love to hear from them!

Since nobody noticed that they're all the same tree, I will consider a
triumph. :) Thanks :)

--Boumboum34

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