Hi Everyone,
I ran across this a couple of weeks ago, and it seemed like just what I was looking for, to add landscaping to a house that I’m modeling.
The only problem is I can’t get it to work. The alpha mapped tree tga file that I’m trying to use, shows up OK on the mesh plane, but the plane still renders in the scene instead of being transparent. I’ve seen several models here on elysiun in the past, that look like what I’m trying to do. I’m hoping it can be done with Blender.
Thank you for any advise you may have.
You need to turn off “traceable” on the texture options I believe. You may also have to turn the “Alpha” down on it. I had to mess around with this for a while today so I know the exact problem you ran into.
Thank you for replying Desoto-111.
I turned off Traceable in the Materials section. As I lowered Alpha a little at a time the tree mapped plane kept getting darker, until at Alpha 0, they became invisable. I’ll keep playing around with the settings, maybe I have something turned on, off, or not set correct. Maybe the alpha mapped tree I downloaded wasn’t prepared right.
shadows for alpha-mapped objects do not consider the alpha channel
until it reaches 0 (then it disappears)
to make it fade out you will have to make it cast shadows from it’s own lamp. I don’t know exactly how that would work, maybe someone can figure it out?
you would need to have that lamp textured with the shilouette of your object (even considering alpha), and then project shadows. As for the generation of what the image projected by the lamp is you can check http://oldsite.blender3d.org/showitem.php?id=57
Here ya go. These two images display the settings you need to use to get it to work. If you have any questions about them, I’ll post a walkthrough. Hope this helps:
<EDIT> For those of you who noticed the dragon from my WC#66 entry, this was a failed attempt at bringing the dragon into photoshop to give it more of a distressed look. In the end I used the settings shown above to put this image onto a plane and then attempted to wrap the planed onto the flaps of the helmet, however the texture didn’t render clearly enough so I threw in the towel on that idea and went with the original meshes. Big postscript I know, but I wanted to ensure everyone I didn’t nab the dragons from the net.
Wow, am I ever happy, it works like a charm. Thank you so much Desoto-111, I really appreciate your help! Posting a screen shot of the Blender material and texture settings, I couldn’t ask for anything more. I’ve been fooling around with this for 2 weeks now, trying every setting I could think of. The render came out fantastic, just took a lot lot longer to render the scene with ZTransp turned on.
z3rO d, thank you for your reply, I’ll work on what you suggested and see how that turns out!
Thanks again everyone for your help. 
Glad to be of service 
Here’s how you can have shadows:
(Note that for the person I had separate videos for the black and white alpha-map and the coloured [“straight”] part)
You just align the square spotlight through the topview. You can even rotate the lamp and resize it separately on the x and y axes. (Press s, then resize along the desired axis for a while, then click the middle mouse button, and it will only resize along one axis - then click the left mouse button)
The only problem with the shadows is that they make it object the object is simply a plane. 
Those tree textures are normally used the same way… except you’re supposed to have them directly face the camera so there is no distortion. I had it rotated a bit so you could see the shadow coming out of the side. If it is a tree you can move the shadow around to the side because it has a central trunk (you don’t have to worry about feet matching up with the shadows)
Man…I need the info from Desotto-111’s images but they are not appearing. Is there a way that someone can list such settings?
Thanks ahead of time.
Cheers,
Landis
Landis I’ll fix the links for you right now. I know exactly why you need it too. The AIRMAN NEEDS HAIR! w00t!