3D animated Steem Money Tree model

I'm just learning how to make 3D models, so I really don't know what I'm doing and it takes me forever to make a fairly simple model. The idea was to make an animated GIF of a Steem Money Tree and use it in a post on FaceBook to let my friends know why I'm not on FaceBook any more.

The tree on the left is what the final product should look like, except that my GIF animation software turned the alpha channel (transparent background) into a black background. Perhaps the software doesn't support an alpha channel? It's old software and no longer supported, so I had to re-do the whole thing using a white background instead.

The first thing I did was to create a One Steem Dollar note using ordinary drawing software.

Then I used my 3D software (Blender) to create a tree; added 'bones' to manipulate the branches; and then added leaves using the particle/hair generator.

(Sorry, I don't know how to stack these images side by side)

The drawn "leaves" or SBD notes are assigned to be the material of the leaves. The branches with leaves are then given movement to simulate the force of wind and the trunk and branches are given a material using an image of real bark.

A "camera" is assigned to the scene and pointed at the tree. The camera is then moved around within the scene to move farther or closer to the tree.

The next step is to render all the individual frames as seen through the camera into a continuous file so that I can scrub along the timeline to see what my animation actually looks like. My computer is not powerful enough to calculate all the data points and reproduce the scene in a fluid motion. It takes a second or 2 to redraw the screen for each frame and that is too slow to see what I'm actually getting, so I made a video file to see what it looked like.

My first idea was to do a fly-around, but once rendered, the movement was too fast, so I trippled the number of frames to slow down the movement. Rendering this file into a video took about an hour and a half. This would now create a huge file that would take too long to load into a browser if made into a GIF, so I abandonned the idea of doing a GIF of a fly-around.

I still wanted the viewer to see that the "leaves" were actually money, so instead of doing a complete circle around the tree, I figured I would simply start with a close-up of the "leaves" and zoom straight out to show the tree swaying in the wind.

Unfortunately, even this would have created a huge file if I waited long enough to see the branches swaying in the wind and go back to the starting point so that the GIF could loop fluidly. I left it as a video clip.

In the end, I chose frames from the animation that were on extreme ends of the sway and rendered them into a series of still PNG images. I then copied all the images to another folder and re-named them in reverse order, but as a continuation of the file numbers used for the first set of images. Then by combining the 2 sets of images into one folder and using all those images to create my GIF file, I was able to get a smooth and flicker-free animation of the tree swaying side to side as seen at the top of the page.