Leaf textures, best approach for alpha

Support Materials and Textures
1

I have a lot of plants to make blender friendly, mostly editing the materials. Some time ago I did a tutorial on plants by Julien deVille, who advised using a Principled BSDF for the image texture (of leaf or petal), a Transparent BSDF, and a MixShader driven by the alpha output of the image texture. Then set the blend mode to alpha clip.

The plants are from XFrog, and I’m importing them (as obj) into Blender. The default shader for leaves seems to be the image texture into a Principled BSDF, and the same texture into the alpha input of the same shader, with blend mode set to alpha clip (which I have to set manually). It doesnt seem to make any difference if I feed the color output or the alpha output of the image texture into the alpha input.

I can’t see any difference between these two approaches, but perhaps there will be under certain conditions that I haven’t discovered yet. I’d appreciate some advice on the optimum approach. Julien is a Blender certified trainer, so I presume there’s some reason why he went with an apparently more complex approach.

2

Alpha being built into the Principled BDSF was only a relatively recent change, if the tutorial was old enough then maybe the change wasn’t in Blender yet. The way in the tutorial was how we used to do it.

3

Thanks, that’s probably the reason. Tutorial was in 2.79. Guess I’ll go with the simpler approach in future.