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I'm trying to find the best way of making some low-poly 3D shrubs that will work in both SU and renderers. This one is ok in Podium, but I need to work on transparency maps to get it to work in some of the others. This stuff is all image-based, with no 'solid' geometry at all.
I've been learning a lot about transparent png files lately. It appears that a png is not all it seems. Photoshop, Corel Photopaint and PSP all produce different pngs that don't talk at all well to each other...or to some renderers. On the surface, they're all the same...RGB 24bit, layer0 etc...but in reality they have all kinds of redundant information in them that sometimes shows up as completely opaque in certain software...despite being completely transparent in the image editor. Photoshop seems to be worst of all in this regard....which is why (if you use it) a png always looks pretty cruddy when you first import it into SU; and in the thumbnail in the Material browser. There's a ton of detail that you thought you'd deleted, but which is in fact still there.
Luckily, there are a few free png optimizers floating around on the Net that not only get rid of all this junk but can also appreciably reduce the file size as well.
Anyhow, here's an early test for your gardening pleasure. The individual bush components are under 300 faces each. There's a degree of flicker and 'silver lining' to the edges when opened in SU by themselves (obviously, some aspect of the SU OpenGL background display), but when they are placed in context it largely disappears.
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Hi Alan,
Nice shrub, indeed!
As for png funkiness - add to the list that Paint.NET only saves a transparent channel if you save it in 32 bit. I guess that also adds to file size. Otherwise it creates them fairly nice and very easily as in the workflow, whatever you delete from the single background layer, will be transparent by default so no need to fiddle around with layers, adding channels and such.
Anyway, here is a Twilight render - without touching any kind of material or lighting settings, only the render preset set to "Low+" - it renders them very nicely.
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Thanks, Gai. I've started playing around with Twilight myself. I think I like it...all the sophistication of V-Ray but handles transparency straight out of SU without having to mess with separate maps.
Here's another default render. Things are looking good so far...390 faces per tree.
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Yeah, even if you do not purchase and use it for PR renderings, the eval version (and its 800x600 pixel output) should be enough to experiment with your "products" - as for how they behave there.
They should more or less render the same way in Kerkythea then. AND I presume, the soon coming Thea Render would behave somewhat similar - although its material handling is said to be different, still Tomasz is the one who writes the exporter (as of Kerkythea's original su2kt) therefore there shouldn't be any issues with it.
I really wonder why V-ray hasn't been made to recognise alpha transparency yet. One of the most powerful rendering applications - and not only for SU but for several, other modelling soft as well.
BTW nice trees/shrubs again (what are junipers - trees or bushes?)
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