Growing leaves

[gregsandor]

...

[Mohawk20]

I'd say you would have to make the trees a lot smaller for good scale....

[gregsandor]

I'm taking a side track at the moment; I want to see if I can use my forest mask on the Y axis to control blending between the fully opaque leaf and bigben's gradient mask, so the trees in whitest areas will be fully opaques and at the grey-black areas will have thinner leaves.

[bigben]

I'm taking a side track at the moment; I want to see if I can use my forest mask on the Y axis to control blending between the fully opaque leaf and bigben's gradient mask, so the trees in whitest areas will be fully opaques and at the grey-black areas will have thinner leaves.

This is a little more complicated, because you're trying to mask leaf surfaces at a tree level within a population.  From memory you need to include something like a Voronoi 3D diff scalar to provide masking at this scale. Your garden variety PF is only useful at the leaf level for surfacing, or for controlling distribution of a population.

Another thing to take into consideration with the demo distribution mask in this post is that you may have to decrease the object spacing below what you think it should be because much of the mask will have values <1, which will decrease the density of trees.  I've moved my leaf growing animation to my PC at work and am running a test on this one now.

[gregsandor]

Well, that explains my headache...  I haven't been able to get a blend yet.  Currently trying just to blend two colors in the color function.  I'don't know how to use the 3d voronoi node, so I'll plug one in and see what happens.

[gregsandor]

...

[gregsandor]

I guess I'll go back to using separate populations using the mask you set up.
While I'm thinking of it it would be nice to be able to use the same method to vary the scale of the objects in a single population.

[bigben]

It may well be simpler to create an extra population for the dead/dying trees. It's relatively difficult getting good variation at the tree level of a population.

I've started another post where it might be more appropriate to move this offshoot from my original topic. http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5049.msg52266#msg52266  It might make easier reading when I get some more samples of growing leaves to add here.

[gregsandor]

...

[bigben]

Try decreasing the spacing in the populations.
Old x 0.7
Medium x 0.5
Young x 0.3

.. and post results in http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5049.msg52266#msg52266

[bigben]

OK. Back on topic...  here are a few early frames from the up close animation showing the beginnings of the leaf stem.  The model is the public XFrog birch.

Switching to a progressive render (updating my render management database)

[bigben]

into the prgressive render now.  Here's frame 64 with a closeup of a partial leaf.  Don't ask me where the small artefacts are coming from  (look like flies around the leaves) I have no idea. I can't find anything in the mask images.

Detail 0.7, AA 3

You can clearly see the shape of the gradient used for the mask... an ellipse centred at the base of the leaf... but it gives a reasonable impression of a leaf from a small distance further away.

[gregsandor]

This looks great.

[bigben]

OK, here's a sequence that shows images from each stage.
1° stem > petioles > leaf blade.

[old_blaggard]

Very nice! I wish that there was a way to do this from within TG2 without having to reload the models every frame.