free Blender model of a red maple

As something different from all the coding I'd like to present you a freebie model of a small red maple (Acer rubrum, wikipedia)

The tree was created with my Space Tree Pro add-on (available on Blender Market). It can be used as is or (if you have the Space Tree Pro add-on) tweaked to your liking.

The tree

The tree is a generated mesh object called Tree and has a particle emitter parented to it. So if you move it make sure you move the tree mesh and not just its particles (called LeafEmitter). The materials used for the leaves can be tweaked to give an even redder appearance if you like, but I chose to tone it down a bit towards slightly more late autummn orange/yellow.

The shape of the tree crown was modeled (roughly) on the 'Autumn Glory Maple' (Red maple, Acer Rubrum) (see e.g. https://goo.gl/images/DUAFw4 ) and the leaves were taken from a photographic reference (see below) and most likely from a north American red maple. The bark material is a simple procedural material.

If you render the scene be aware that the bark material uses the experimental micro displacement settings and is set to GPU. So depending on your system you might not see all surface detail in the trunk that you see in the sample rendering and micro displacement is heavy on RAM so you might need to use your CPU to render anyway.

Availability

The .blend file is available for download from GitHub (right click and save as ...). It is fairly large (76MB) because of the packed image files and because the tree mesh and the leaf particle system add up to about 240k tris. It is distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Additional credits

Even though these individuals provided material under a CC0 license, I really appreciate their efforts so I would like to point you to their respective web pages.

The environment HDR used in the scene is from HDRI Haven (https://hdrihaven.com/) by Greg Zaal. Specifically the low res version of the river walk. It was used without changes in this scene. Greg's HDRIs are free (CC0) but you can support his work on Patreon

The original leaf images are from Dustytoes on Pixabay They were also provided under a CC0 license and already isolated from the background. You might want to give her a thumbs up. I created 7 individual textures from the original and converted them to PBR texture maps using Substance Designer's Bitmap to material node.