Now that you have PBR at your fingertips: these are some helpful tips for rendering beautiful organic looking barks for your trees.

This section is highly subjective to the artist. Our new SpeedTree 8 library includes many different options and multiple maps to choose front. Here are some basic set ups that will help with quick tweaking:

Flaky Bark

• use a fin generator
• using a tilted height map with displacement

Rough Bark

• Boost the Normal's contrast
• set your gloss levels lower (but keep in mind that gloss also helps show depth).
• add displacement
• optional: use displacement from a height map
  

Smooth Bark

• decrease the Normal's contrast
• increase the gloss value
  

Ridged Bark

• using displacement, push the U scale up high with the V scale moderately low
• use flares
• increase contrast of the normal

Wet Bark

• Contrasted normal
• boost saturation
• increase gloss
  

Changing Bark

• use a shell or multiple shell for transitions
• use different materials per generator and use the branch blending options
  

Burnt Bark

• remove saturation in the color map
• increase the contrast in the gloss for dull and shiny bits to stand out
• change the specular to a dark shade
• add small amount of metallic value