Inside T2 Magnolia

[MGebhart]

So, who's getting sick of this dang, almost, tree?  

Here is a render of a small branch with a few leaves in Terragen. This was done to test the use of a multi-sub-object material. There is only one leaf type on this test. There will be a total of around 10 unique leaf maps for variety. The render has not been retouched. The branch is a quick model only to test the texture and displacement.

I swear I'm  getting there.

Thanks for your patients.

[Henry Blewer]

It's like wine. It's ready to drink when it's ready to drink. This will be/is a beautiful plant.

[Tangled-Universe]

Looks VERY good and promising so far
The only thing I'm not very fond of at the moment are the angles of the edges of the leaves.

Cheers,
Martin

[MGebhart]

Martin,

I agree. I'll need to up the poly count on the leaf geometry just a bit more to round the edges. This shouldn't impact the heaviness of the tree to much.

Thanks for your input.

[choronr]

Waiting patiently for this one Mark. Looks very good so far.

[old_blaggard]

Looks promising! I agree with Martin, though: the leaves need to be smoother.

[Dune]

Isn't it possible to work with alpha channels here, Marc? To get rid of the edges.

[MGebhart]

Dune,

Yes it is. I'll play around with it to see if the results look cool. That would certainly eliminate the need to increase poly count.

[Walli]

actually it´s often good if you can get away without use of alpha channel, as this is one of the biggest rendertime killers. But as TG is 32bit at the moment memory is of course also of concerne. If you are just a bit away from the leaves, you usually don´t notice the harder edges anymore. But for closeups on the other hand. I can very well feel your dilemma!
It´s such a pitty that it´s still more or less impractical to have a tree in its full glory ;-)

[Henry Blewer]

It would be nice to have 'Hero' trees for close work. Distant trees don't need so much detail.

[Dune]

alpha channel, as this is one of the biggest rendertime killers.

Is that so? Good to know that. So for distant trees with simple leaf shapes, better shape the leaves (more or less) and give them color/shine, etc instead of alpha? Even if the leaf texture is a tiny TIFF of 200kB?

---Dune

[Walli]

it depends on the render engine of course, but especially for raytracers alpha channels are often very slow to render. A while ago I had to do a landscape animation and for distant populations (not TG, was Cinema4D) I simply turned the alphachannel off, this saved a lot of time. This is especially true if you have global illumination turned on.

And often its still faster if you use a slightly more detailed leaf, just so that it is not just a square, as long as you can turn of the alpha.

But of course you always have to keep memory in mind

[MGebhart]

Walli,

Thanks for the information.

Marc

[Dune]

Thanks again Walli! I will keep that in mind.

---Dune

[Walli]

by the way, I don´t know if that applies for TG too, I didn´t try that yet.