This exists to point out that my background for my portfolio is fully 3D generated! I grabbed some free tree models off of the internet and then a nice HDRI for the lighting on HDRI haven. Put them all together with some basic materials and wall, and got a pretty nice looking scene.
The “animations” are simply 3D noise based vertex deforms which animate the noise pattern cause the leaves to wiggle. The branches have one too that has a larger noise texture and moves more slowly (as branches do).
To elaborate, the texture I used looks something like this:
You can imagine this texture moving around and the dark spots mean moving a vertex (3D point) on the leave down and a light spot (pixel) means moving the leave vertex up. Since the transitions from light to dark are gradual you end up with a pretty smooth “wiggle” effect on the leaves, no animating required!
I also used a nifty Blender feature that lets me set an object to only render its shadows so the camera sees the wall instead of a bunch of leaves. The trickiest part of this was getting it run reasonably well on the website. I ended up having the compress it into a gif format that while still quite big manages to load fast enough on most browsers.
