SgWRX

for some reason this just didn't come easy for me, but i've finally figured out a good way to make panel trees!

1. create full poly onyx trees and instance them to get about 5 or 6 trees
2. drop in a mrsun&mrsky
3. render selected trees with FG *and the mr physical sky bg turned off
4. save the image as a TGA **using the split alpha (i can't believe i've missed that option until today)
5. create an arch&design material. in the arch&design add the split out alpha to the cutout and reduce blur to 0. in the diffuse add the color bitmap.
6. create a plane, 1x1 segments, convert to edit poly
7. add uvwmap to plane and bitmap fit with the rendered tga
8. adjust width and height of plane (now and edit poly) using vertex subobject move
9. frickin render!

geez i can even align to camera and if the trees go into shadow (facing away from mrsun) i can use the color tga file as additional self illumination!

i get little or NO fringe on the trees when they overlap (one in front of the other) especially when i use blur of 0. and, unless i'm mistaken, it renders a lot faster than a standard material with opacity map.

this is awesome! and you can vary the output amount of the diffuse map to get variation in tree color. or tint them. oh man.

edit: the attached image is highly compressed so there's a little fringe around the trees.

prodham

i was thinking about something like this last week, but only got as far as rendering multiple (onyx) trees with an alpha channel

thanks for the tips...

ipxstudios

I thought the new Max 2009 Mental ray system uses proxy objects. Then it would work like Vray and you could use as many proxies in the model without dragging the render time.

SgWRX

forgot to mention i have max 9.