Macro Leaf Scattering by dburdick
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Description
Vue7.5I: I have been searching for a forumla to render more realisitic looking tree foliage populations - particularly for midrange and distant ecosystems. The fundamental problem is that the leaf alpha maps used in Vue are very harsh in the sense that they create very hard, saturated looking foliage which is fine for closeups, but not very good for midrange/distant renders. So here is a render progression using various leaf material formulas. The bottom two images use a procedural leaf alpha noise I came up with (no image maps - all procedural) which helps to allow the light, atmosphere and surrounding colors to bleed though and create more of a natural scattering effect, particularly in the lower right soft alpha image. Using a soft procedural alpha creates much nicer looking, more natural looking foliage. The downside is that using a soft alpha for the leaf material increases render times by 4x to 5x.
Comments (11)
lior
Superb artwork!
pops
Very interesting as I am trying to learn Vue
meselfr
very cool... love my vue!
mojoDallas
It does look better. I have created my own alpha maps for things. I am not sure what you mean by a soft procedural alpha map. Does that mean the area between the black and white portions of the map got blurred with noise being added?
chippwalters
Interesting. I wasn't aware of this phenomena.
FrankT
You learn something new every day :) (not so keen on the x4 or x5 render times though! :) )
Lunastar
That is alot of added render time. It does look good though.
wabe
Very interesting test Dave. As Chipp I wasn't aware of that. Will keep it in my thoughts (I hope there are some).
Rutra
Very useful to know, thanks!
FrenchKiss
Interesting experiment. Your trees look great! It's a shame that the render time is so long, though.
missgrin
Great work....