2.5d images , cropped or what ?

theJedi

Hi
I do landscape design and primarily work on AutoCAD. I am finding sketchup a lot more fun and a much better tool for my proposals. I am having a problem though in terms of plant material in my landscapes because they are very specific and to give an accurate representation the plant components need to be 100% accurate.
I have found a lot of very accurate components on the internet but not specifically what I am looking for. I now need to start creating these plants myself. What I would like to do is , take a photo of leaves/flowers/barktextures and colours etc, i then would like to make use of them in sketchup. I can add the textures and colors to the paintbucket no problem , the issue comes in when I wanto import an image of a flower or a leaf. its shape is very specific and i dont know how to crop it to the specific shape and keep it that way for importing to the sketchup model.
Can anyone help me to achieve this ?

Gaieus

With leaf and similar, non-rectangular shapes the best is to prepare the files in an image editing program. There you select all the background and turn those parts transparent. Save it as a png file and import that as an image and make your components that way.

theJedi

Thanks , Ill give it a bash. Would you be able to suggest an appropriate program that I can download ?

Gaieus

Well, Gimp is a freeware and very powerful image editor. Paint.NET is a bit simpler (both as its features and the learning curve).

I have just grabbed this image from the Internet. Notice that the background is completely white so it is easy to select with a tool called "Magic wand".

In Paint.NET, after selecting the white pixels, you do nothing but press the Delete button and save the file as PNG (with 32 bit). I also cropped it to the extent of the leaf...

Note however that SketchUp will not be able to cast a leaf-shape shadow but transparent pixels will also cast shadow - this means that your leaf shadow will be rectangular. I am not sure if this is an issue since if you add some more edges to draw around, model complexity (with lots of leaves and trees) may slow SU down considerably.

Import both into SU and see the difference.

theJedi

Thanks very much Gaieus!

I am using photoshop to edit the plant images as you have explained and it is working well , and is awesome once rendered.
How do I make them 'faceme' images , normally when I import a .jpg it gives me that option , however , I am importing these images as a .psd and I cannot change thereafter , or probably can but just dont know how.

Thanks again.

Gaieus

Are you saying you import the images in psd format?

Well anyway, I would suggest to explode the image if you are importing as an image. SketchUp will create a face (true geometry with the four edges enclosing it) which you can turn into a face-me component quite easily. Below is a short video how to do it (it's a Roman soldier but trees work the same way)