After talking with Niall a bit about his opinion of my tree he explained that he wanted the leaves to have a more bunched up look, on top of that, it’s taking far too long to render out the trees, after removing the alpha maps I found they rendered much faster, so I am afraid that the alpha maps for my textures might be too complex to render in a reasonable amount of time, so I’ve Tried making a texture with a simpler shape
Unfortunately, I don’t think this new texture or alpha maps made much of a difference, however I do prefer this new texture over the old one as I feel that it can make a better looking tree with this texture and a better layout for the planes, the layout I have currently doesn’t really work for this texture
Tree with leaves – Test 2
Tree with leaves – Test 1
Learning Renderman + Alphas
So I was able to get my painted tree Branch texture working in maya software but I needed to get it to work in Renderman as that is the rendering software we plan to use. Despite me saving my texture as a PNG with a transparent background, the background was showing up as white when rendering with “Renderman”.
It took a while but I managed to figure out the terminology for “Renderman” and how to control the transparency and visibility of my textures, now I can use flat textures to create leaves, tree branches and other foliage, allowing me to keep the poly count low
Painting leaves
So the leaves that I had made previously were considered to be too shiny, Niall explained that the leaves should mostly be flat colour. I’ve done a little research looking into how and why leaves change colour, Now I am using the leaf I painted previously to make the other leaf colours.
The forest is the natural habitat of our characters so it was the natural choice, and having it set during the autumn allows for use of a lot of vibrant colour, which will aid the animation in being visually stunning and beautiful.
We want our animation to take place during the early stages of autumn, I think by having the animation set during the early stages, it will allow us to use some of the most vibrant of colours while still using a good amount of green and being able to give the trees a very full look
Matthew McBride 