Billboard Trees & Shadows..Help?
-
Ive searched on this forum and tried the podium forum, but had not luck so I was wondering if anyone recalls a thread about a plugin/workaround to get proper shadows for billboard planyt like the podium plant collection? The below image is what I end up with and the square shadows are obviously inacurate... Im looking to get shadows of the trees' outlines and I could have sworn I saw a thread about that, but I cant seem to find it. Any help or direction is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance guys.
-
Are you planning to render it? if yes then the shadows will be correct once rendered, in raw SU the shadows will not as the alpha in the .png do not apply to shadows.
-
I dont plan on rendering it, the clients only want a composited SU view with a photograph... I know the shadows would work in v-ray with the proper masks, but like you said they just give a box shadow because of it only being SU. I just could have sworn that I saw a thread about a ruby that fixes that...something tells me that It was in relation to the SU podium tree collection, because they released their tree collection and so many people were complaining about the shadows and I thought someone came up with a solution; do you or anyone else recall something like that? Because I am not having any luck finding the thread.
-
Can you post one .png tree here and i will give it a go?
-
ok i just took the texture image and saved it to my desktop...it looks like it may be problematic so let me know if it works for you.
-
It's a jpg, I cannot do much with it, is there a clipmap that goes with it?
-
You can quickly trace an outline of the tree, and delete the extra. You can be very rough and still get a fine shadow in SU.
-
Yeah,whatever you read (there have been a couple of threads) must have been about how - and to what extent ("accuracy") to trace around these billboard trees. That's the only way for SU to cast shadows.
There is a plugin - ImageProfile - that dos this at Smustards but though the plugin itself is free, you need to pay per image processed via their server.
As Thom says, a couple of relatively rough outlines can work pretty realistically from this "distance".
Also, you can have a look at this topic and create your own trees with pre-set "accuracy" of the cutout. All automated and can produce a bunch of nice trees in a couple of minutes (and you wouyld end up with a better variety of the same kind than what you have now with the repeating trees).
-
ahe thats it Gaieus, thats the topic i was thinking about and I forgot that it was more of a service you pay for and thats why I never used it. At least now I dont have to pull my hair out trying to find it. Im gonna try a few of the suggestions and see how that turns out. Thanks guys.
Advertisement