I didn’t like the cone shaped trees I had, so I drew some in Blender and exported out as GLTF. GLTF is a common model exchange format that’s supported out of the box in Three JS. I don’t really know much about the other formats. My first attempt at loading the GTLF model didn’t seem to load the material. But when I inspected it more closely it seemed to load it with metallic at 100% causing it to render trees black. To make the trees visible, I had to make them larger than realistic. But if I make them more realistic sized and draw lots of trees, the scene grinds to a halt. I think I need to use a particle system instead to draw the trees.

Blender is so powerful that I wish I had some of their shader UI and material selection in Three JS, but maybe if I can get the materials to load properly in Three JS using the GLTFLoader, I’d get the best of both worlds.

I learn most of Blender through YouTube videos and a lot of the stuff I learn is super relevant to this whole rendering exercise.