Thank you John :-)
Allow me to give you some background info, how I am doing stuff...
XFrog is getting better, but the older plants have often very small maps and the masks are crude.
Sometimes you got images as png, or tif, then as tga, even gif. One map comes in 72 dpi, other times it is 247.03 dpi or has 1200 dpi and so on...
Therefore I always make a Photoshop file from the original images, scale them equally to 300 dpi and mostly make a new mask because the originals are often not as good as they should.
Here I blow them up (from a small 512 up to 10000), then apply a gauss blur filter, scale them down again and cutout a new mask with soften edges (I fine-tune the mask after I down scaled it in Photoshop).
This way, the mask is better as the original, especially if they are small! Normally I also like to unsharp the edges only a little bit, so transparency looks more soften and not so sharp at the edges of a leaf.
I know about alpha channels. So please be patient for a moment Ulco, I will render a new image overnight with a corrected shader settings for the palms.
I also added some different new leafs to the green palms. Originally it had only one leaf which was nasty and has been replaced by a new painted leaf.
In the beginning I painted only one leaf, now I have painted six different colored leafs... this looks very promising...
Your hint to make the leafs a little bit transparent is really great!!! It looks so much more natural, not so dark in the center!!!
Studio Palm Set
Color 1.0 - Translucency 0.0 - Fresnel 0.1 - Opacity 1.0 (leafs only one color)
Studio Palm Set
Color 1.0 - Translucency 0.25 - Fresnel 0.05 - Opacity 0.8 (leafs in six different colors)
STORMLORD