Billboard trees
TangoAlpha
Posts: 4,584
I thought I saw someone mention a plugin that can help make billboard style trees out of a regular tree model, but I'm danged if I can find it now. Was I imagining it? If not, could some kind soul give me a pointer? Thanks :)
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Not really a plugin, so maybe not what you were thinking of, but DimensionTheory put out ecomantics which has tons of trees and plants on billboards for faster rendering.
http://www.daz3d.com/ecomantics-efficient-ecosystems
You can make your own by rendering a tree against a blank background and rendering an alpha channel.
Xfrog is giving away tons of freebies and they all come with billboards, which need to be converted from .tif to .png to work in Carrara.
http://xfrog.com/category/samples.html
I think this may be the thread you are looking for:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/49303/P36
a quick nasty way to do it is put a BW silhouette of the tree in terrain editor, convert to vertex object and delete all the bits bellow top flat shape giving a shaped cutout you do not need to transmap as much like DT's trees.
I like that one, Wendy.
Transmap is a sure way to slow down renders. It's often a good idea to trade polys (in a reasonable fashion) for transparency.
Furthermore, if you have an height map of the tree, you can give it some depth, which is far better for the final output, specifically giving more realistic shadows.
Morning all, thanks for the suggestions. :coolsmile: The purpose I have in mind for this is for distant trees where detail is not so important, (and for building a scene in my 32-bit Poser, where 1000 extra polys is way more evil than 1 transmap - shorter render times are moot if you can't load the scene. It doesn't take much to hit the dreaded Out of Memory dialog!)
Dustrider: That's exactly the thread, thanks. For some reason I had thought it was in the Carrara section, which was why I couldn't find it.
Wendy: That's an interesting idea and might be a good compromise if the poly count isn't too high. I could try that technique too for some of my existing transmapped leaves.
This was done using 3 Xfrog billboards on a surface replicator ( X 1000) - render time with default settings, using GI, 13m28s - without GI, 25s. This on an i5 machine, Win 7.
Total poly count = 3 :)
Carrara supports .tiff. Why does it need to be converted to .png? Personally, I do prefer .png as the file size is more reasonable and it is still loss-less.
you may only need another f in the filename
as in tiff
think BMP in capitals upsets it too
When I first started using the Xfrog billboards, .tif didn't work correctly - the solid part of the picture was translucent and the alpha was semi-transparent. Converting to .png got it to work. I made a thread of this, looking for a solution - IIRC, it was Holly who gave a technical explanation and I finally found a batch converter to convert to .png. (XnView).
The later .tif files, such as the ones I used in this pic, work just fine. It is not at all unusual to find that some flavours work in one application and not in others - Bryce and Gimp .bmp don't work in Carrara, but work correctly in other apps.
I'll try converting these to .png, see if that will cut down on render time.
Correction - total poly count = 0. The actual billboards are invisible, only the replicated ones show :)
Wendy - the full name is Tiff, but the file extension is .tif, just as the full name of .jpg is JPEG :)