go to 'show' and select 'none' and then 'curves' and then delete the cures because I am not so interested in the shape of what is to come but the specular highlights, I could use the curves to change the 'branches' later but this is not about modelling as such.

I duplicste e few of the trees (yes that's what hey are, the maguc forest)

go to the top view and move them around forest like

addd a ground plane and scale a few trees to force perspective

add a camera so I can see what I'm doing outside 'perspective' and for a change of environment colour later which will be important with refractions

two views, two heads are better than one, perspective and camera 1

the ground plane needs a texture, I chose 'concrete' but that's not what I'll end up with because...

I click the blinn node and click the 'inputs and outputs' icon to see the conections so I can

drag the file onto the blinn node and when the contect conections menu comes up I chose not colour but 'bump map'

up comes the bump map node and I click it or 'control A' to get to the attributes and set it sort of high, well higher than concrete anyway

lup it comes and I set the bump depth at '.3'

we need light so I add a piont light

let there be light

I set a light blue colour for 'enviroment' on camera 1's attributes

I go to the piont light attributes and give a little yellow for the sun and for 'shadows' pick a dark blue, nearly black, to give a better and more realistic shaow because of the blues reflected from the sky in the 'real world'.