Custom Leaf mesh - IG mesh = Faster Fay-tracing

[3DMK]

3DMK TreeLine - Philodendron -Xanadu

 

Hi All,

 

Another render of the latest tree I made for purchase. Although I originally made it using the leaf mesh in GrowFX I found that ray-tracing was too slow with all the alpha mapping in the texture.

So I decided to build a custom leaf mesh that was closer to the alpha texture & it rendered much faster....ohh how I hate modeling by hand.

Anyway the result was well worth the effort as it rendered much faster and you can even turn the alpha channel if the plant is far enough away from the camera.

So remember that sometimes modeling things by hand, such as leaves & flowers is sometimes necessary and that's why the IG MESH is there for us to use. [iG MESH can now also create instances in the latest version]

GrowFX was also used to create the actual leaf texture as well as it was impossible to scan or photograph a real leaf properly

Hope this helps

Jamie

[Tora_2097]

Looking very good Jamie and I also came to despise modeling by pushing vertices for hours on end.

You probably know this, but alpha clipped surfaces render a lot faster if you disable filtering all together in the map settings (only for the alphamap). A real mesh will still be faster though.

 

Ben

[austingrd]

Good job here. Overall, a nice preview for me. 

[3DMK]

Looking very good Jamie and I also came to despise modeling by pushing vertices for hours on end.

You probably know this, but alpha clipped surfaces render a lot faster if you disable filtering all together in the map settings (only for the alphamap). A real mesh will still be faster though.

 

Ben

Thanks for the tip Tora

I was aware of that but it still had too much area to alpha-clip, & as you know every extra second of render time saved is very important to some people, especially those doing animations. It also has the benefit of being able to turn the alpha off if the plant is only in the distance/background.

Jamie