Isotropix Forums

Hi, I have some tree models which have a few too many leaves. The leaves are a simple plane to which the image maps are applied to as a UV with an alpha/clipping mask.

I'd like to reduce the amount of leaves on the tree by about 25%.
I had a few ideas but was not sure how to get them to work.

1) some kind of switch/instance colour setup (where one of the colours has an alpha of 0) piped into the opacity input of the material?
2) run the leaf material through a shading layer and associate the material with a clipping mask, and have that clipping mask somehow randominsed so on 1 of 4 instances it returns an alpha of 0
3) use the existing leaf geo to drive a scatterrer and tweak as required.

Any thoughts or other ideas?

thanks

Hi,

Number 2 is the way to go. Opacity is heavier to evaluate than clipped geometries. But how did you export your trees ?

Cheers

Hi Demain,

I have a couple different models, one (obj) where the trunk, branches and leaves are all one mesh, but have different materials assigned to them. So I was using a shading layer based on materials to assign.
The other is an alembic, with leaves on one, and branches the other. Again a shading layer but identifying the geo name.

Can you give me an example of what the randomnised clipping mask solution might look like?

Thanks heaps,

Hi,

With such geometries, it's not possible. You have to somehow export a property that has a different value (between 0 and 1 for example ) on each leaf. Then you would be able to clip leaves based on this property.

Another way will be like you describe on 3). Export Trunk + branches, and a primitive instead of each leave. Use this geo as support for a scatterer (with a point cloud set to primitive center). With this setup, you will use an instance color to clip or not the scattered leaf.

Cheers

Ok, thanks Demian