Tree color variation

[nvseal]

Can someone tell me how (if it is possible) I can alter the color of a leafs within the same population? Fo example, I want to have some trees that are "brighter" with some trees that are "darker" as if I was moving the color slider up and down.

[Mandrake]

How are you coloring your leaves now? Is it with a .tif file? Because substituting a power fractal, in the internal network node might work but you might lose your true color.

[dhavalmistry]

a default shader with powerfractal as color function.....

[nvseal]

The tree that I want to use is from the free xFrog tgo's, so it uses an image (no sure if it is tif or not). I'm just trying to avoid adding another population to get some different colors.

[Virex]

Try blending the image's colours with the colours of a black and white power fractall.

[bigben]

Try blending the image's colours with the colours of a black and white power fractall.

Or convert the image texture to greyscale and use it as a colour function for a surface shader and plug whatever surfacing you want into the child input. Using different scales for powerfractals you can create variation in colours between leaves on a tree, but changing the colour of separate trees appears to be a bit trickier. (Terrain) slope and altitude masks work OK but that's not necessarily what you want.  This has been one set of tests on my revisit list.

[Virex]

Would setting the minimum feature scale to the size of a tree do the trick?

[Mandrake]

Bunch of wind anywho, if you have 1,2,3, different leaves on your tree... Your colors are going to vary naturally from the sunlight. If your colors are all to dark or all the same. Your doing the tree wrong.
This one leaf may look 15 different ways if your sun is right.

[JimB]

If you need to brighten the trees but don't want to go through the headache of modifying Tiff files only to have them not load in your next render, blah, blah, go into the internal network and multi-shader and use a colour adjust node to change the leaf gamma.

If you copy the population and randomise that one's seed, you can modify the gamma on that population's leaves, and give some semblance of variation overall in the render. Remember to change the population densities so they fit the same space.

[Mandrake]

Nice, now were getting somewhere!! Trick is to be able to blend that or those pops so they look natural.. but I like it!

[moodflow]

Would setting the minimum feature scale to the size of a tree do the trick?

Thats a pretty good idea actually!

[bigben]

Been there, tried that. The only thing it succeeded in doing was changing the overall colour of the tree.

... Using different scales for powerfractals you can create variation in colours between leaves on a tree, but changing the colour of separate trees appears to be a bit trickier. (Terrain) slope and altitude masks work OK but that's not necessarily what you want.  This has been one set of tests on my revisit list.

To elaborate on this, I did actually try it. The only thing increasing the feature scale achieved was reducing the variation in colour across the tree, but each separate tree was still a similar colour. I tried a lot of different settings with very different scales and even stretching the fractal in the Y direction, but to no avail.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=730.0

And my suggestion for using a greyscale image for a colour function:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=1032.msg11455#msg11455

[Virex]

Have you tried hooking them all up to exactly the same power fractal (possibly outside of the object)?

Besides that, how does the "Get location" function node work when placed inside a population? If it works as normal you could use it to build a function network from that.

[bigben]

Have you tried hooking them all up to exactly the same power fractal (possibly outside of the object)?

Besides that, how does the "Get location" function node work when placed inside a population? If it works as normal you could use it to build a function network from that.

Tried constructing the surfacing as a normal surface shader (that's how I came up with the scales for the fractals of my original surface as it was quicker to run preview renders)  and then connecting it to the object's internal network... no difference.

Haven't tried building something with get location yet. It may be worth a shot.

[moodflow]

Until there is a procedural method to do this, one "brute force" way I've been getting around it is to simply load another model with slightly different colors.  I used 9 separate models of slightly different colors, all with different sizes and distribution.   Though its sloppy, I think having multiple models like this adds much needed variation to the mix.