Learning to create a quad mesh for this tree and UV unwrapping it in a way that is suitable for 3-d painting has been a challenge for me. I created the textures and images as planes mostly using the techniques in the excellent tutorials of CG Geek. After much frustration trying to get a good painting surface by adding seams to the mesh, I ended up using the Lightmap Pack, which gives decent results. The hdri lighting comes from Andrew Price's Pro Lighting Skies.
Any constructive criticism is welcome. I know the form of the tree is still a bit awkward, and will be re-doing it. Also the scale of the leaves are much too large for the scale of the tree. The grass/weed ground cover is is just a place holder and needs better material properties.
I'm enjoying the texture painting and applying the textures as stencils is quite magical, bu the enjoyment has come only after a lot of frustration. The biggest take-away for me is that the you really need to get all the keyboard and mouse shortcuts down in your muscle memory before the frustration with the procedure will stop. :)
