When you texture a leaf to a tree is the one leaf texture supposed to represent the whole tree or individual leaves? Any time i’ve textured leaves to tree it seems to represent the whole of the foliage. Would this be right as most of the leaf textures need to be clipped etc and then have to be offset and resized to fill the whole tree. Am i doing somethin wrong?
Well, it can be done any way you want. Most games using alpha textures use big branch textures filled with hundreds of leaves and layer them around the tree, not individual leaves.
ok - so why is it if i import a tree i only get one leaf as a texture. As i’m inquiring - do people map that texture to each individual leaf mesh? and how?
It depends on what tree you are importing of course. Some are for close up, some are for distance and games. If you are familiar with the call of duty games, or oblivion, or medal of hoonor, they are all big branches, not individual leaves. That’s low poly work. It all depends on how many poly’s you can “afford”, based on your application - game or high rez - maybe a high rez render of a tree.
hmm politicians answers, them!
So does one leaf texture always cover the whole of the mesh. Should the leaf texture not be assigned to each leaf individually? how can this be acomplised (without the obvious select - assiagn, select - assign)
does this make sense? Probably a silly question but i don’t know the answer yeh!?
I’m trying to sort of explain this. If you want to have a seperate mesh for each leaf, you’'l have thousands of them. Fine for renders and high poly work. Not for games. Don’t worry about what you import or purchase. There are 2 basic approaches. Individual leaves, or maybe 20 planes with branch textures, including leaves. Like drawing a single leaf on a piece of paper representing your plane, or drawing a whole branch with lots of leaves on a piece of paper. You can also model a leaf, and duplicate it thousands of times. Sort of pointless though.
So that’s it basically. 2 aproaches with transparent leaf/branch textures. Play some games, and you’'ll see what I mean. Oblivion has very realitic trees using the branch technique. No game uses individual leaves, unless it’s just a plant with a few leaves.
The key to texturing leaves on a tree is to use ‘UV’ for map input. If each leaf is one poly, then on every leaf, the texture will appear. That is because by default, every polygon is set to fill the entire UV window, so, as long as you don’t change that, the entire image texture appears on every face. Also, you will have to use alpha mapping, also set to map input ‘UV’.
hey med - cheers for your suggestions. I’m actually talking abot hi-def and film , not gaming though.
The tree i imported has about 6-8 polys per leaf all triangulated aswell. I’m just curious cause if i want to get close to the tree in my short i’d be wantting to see a decent texture. Will give the UV and alpha mapping a go. Think i tried alpha before with another setting and halg the tree disappeared in the render. I know why too but sure trial n error
in the texture buttons for the leaf material, click ‘use alpha’, and over in materials, set ‘map to’ to alpha ( in addition to col ) then, turn on ztransp, and slide the alpha slider all the way down. King of complicated, but that is how you use an alpha texture. Then, you might want to turn on ‘trashadow’ for the ground and trunk materials.
Yes. Both of my suggestions use an alpha map. And they are a pain in the ass to set up.