Do you want to create vegetacion in a fast and easy way.?  Using a Particle System to Create Foliage is one of our best kept secrets.  I’d like to add that if you are using vray we have found that the least strainous way to do this method is to acutaly model the leaf and then create a proxy of it and use this as your instanced geometry. less opacity maps the better. also we prefer to use p array for foliage its much simpler to use in this situation and pflow for positioning of trees and scattering leaves over grass etc. (always use proxies)

For our tutorial we need to have (or prepare) a leaf to use for our foliage. (you can use these 2 images)

You can create your leaf plane by either creating a plane and then create a material to apply to it OR you can use my free Billboard Generator to do this automatically.

You will get this: (you can change the size of the leaf with the Height spinner)

Create a BOX with a L: 200 units W: 50 & H: 80

Under the Create Panel > Geometry > Particle Systems Create a PARRAY object.

This is what you should see:

Select the PARRAY object.

- Under the Basic Parameters Rollout:

1. In  Object Based Emitter – Press the Pick Object button and click on the BOX object

2. In Particle Formation – Select Over Entire Surface.

3. In Viewport Display – Set the Percentage of Particles to 10% or less – setting a higher value may halt your system.

- Under the Particle Generation Rollout:

1. In Particle Quantity – set to Use Rate and set the number to 1000 or more  - this actually sets the number of cloned leaves over the entire object – the more the better but do not use too much if your system is not too powerfull.

2. In Particle Timing – set Emot start to -300 and Emit Stop to 30 and Life to arount 50-100.

3. In Particle Size – set the size to your needs. it may depend on various parameters.

- Under the Particle type Rollout:

1. In  Particle Types – Set to Instanced Geometry.

2. In Instancing Parameters – Press the Pick Object button and click on the LEAF object

3. In Material Mapping and Source – set to Instanced Geometry and press the Get Material from: button.

- Under the Rotation and Collision Rollout:

1. In  Speed Spin Controls – Set  Phase to 90 degrees.

Basically – That is All !

This is how it looks:

Select the BOX object and make it unrederable (object properties)

Now render.

Here are two examples: one with a lower rate (around 300) and another with 1000 – obviously  denser but more time consuming.

An awesome thing you can use this process for is to create irregular shapes and apply it to any object you create:

I hope this tutorials helped you.