I know just about nothing about any of the three. I’m currently working through this tutorial
Could someone either explain what they are, how they work and how to use them or point me to a place that does? I looked for other places to explain it but they all expected me to have a previous understanding of them
Perhaps you should start with the basics of material setting.
The am. tutorial will teach you one way to create a tree. It will not help you to get general informations about material and texture settings.
Here is a link to some basic manuals: Blender 3D Design Course
Alpha map: Affects the transparency of the object, and can thus be used to make parts of the model transparent. For example you could map a picture of a leaf to a plane, and then add a alpha map that only shows the leaf, which would result in a object that looks like a leaf, but only has 4 vertices.
Color map: Texture map. Allows you to put an image onto your model
Bump map: Used for making bumps in your model by changing the way shadows appear on the model. Bump maps can be used to add detail without adding actual geometry.
Well I looked into the topic a lot more but now I’m stuck again. If you look at the tutorial from my first post, I just got to the part where I am supposed to mask the leaves. I thought I did it correctly, but when I looked back at the tutorial, his image has a green background. Why did he do this? When I tried to upload my image, I was not able to see the leaves on the plane I created. I looked at the preview image (temporarily turning the z transparency off) and it only shows a white ball (shouldn’t my leaves be wrapped around it?).
This was the image I masked out. I also have another one that has no background but I could only save it as an xcr since other formats can not handle transparency. There must be something I’m missing… Thanks for your help everyone
Hi. The reason I used green for the color map was so there wasn’t a white outline around the leaves. I must have forgot to mention in the tutorial, that for your alpha map (The black and white one) you also have to expand “image sampling”, and uncheck “use” What it’s doing is trying to find an alpha channel on your image, but since you want to use a gray scale image to control transparency, you have to uncheck it.
However, one thing that’s not mentioned in the tutorial, is that I find that using a .png with your color image, and everything else alpha-ed out to be much better than using 2 textures.(it makes things easier to keep track of, and the edges of the leafs will look a lot better too.) To do this, take your color map like you have in that picture, and simply delete all the white, so you see that checkerboard pattern. then save that image as a .png. Apply that image to your material, and make sure that both color, and alpha are checked. Also in “image Sampling” make sure that “use” is checked. If you plan on rendering it, I would recommend checking “premultiply” in “image” that way your edges look good. And lastly, in the “transparency” section of the “materials” bring down the specular to 0. This way you only get shininess on the leaves instead of the transparent areas.