2009 Trees and bushes.

[srude]

Hello,

I have been busy learning the fine points of Blender as I have been building models, using that program.

I made my first track. The roadbed includes normals and displacement mapping, which makes the gravel bumpy, rather than just a smooth surface.

Now, I have turned my attention to making trees and bushes.

I'm sure that anyone who has run the built-in routes in 2009, has noticed the poor state of the trees and bushes. As one rotates those things, they appear as if painted on glass panels. Moreover, the one sample tree provided, is not a very good model, to say the least.

Anyway, I think I'll stick with the crossed panels--I use a mesh plane, to which I apply the art work and the alpha channel.

There is no way of easily making trees and bushes, unless one has highly specialized software or has the time to devote to making trees and bushes for others. In the old days, one could have a fringe around the edge of a bush or tree, indicating the fuzzy boundary. Mesh based stuff requires at lot of additional work to make a bush or tree that is at least a reasonable facsimile of the real thing.

Otherwise, I like the higher resolution in 2009. Even so, I think Auran should have an option, in which one can use the old way of making vegitation.

Cheers,

srude

 

[paulzmay]

Use a high resolution image, and make your alpha map only pure black and white, and incorporate it into the alpha channel of the .tga file, and it will work fine in all versions. It might be a bit heavy on older computers, but it will avoid all of the alpha blending and sorting issues in any version.

Paul

 

[WindWalkr]

Otherwise, I like the higher resolution in 2009. Even so, I think Auran should have an option, in which one can use the old way of making vegitation.

Hi srude,

We do have this option - it's called compatibility mode. While that's turned on, all the old foliage techniques should continue to work. It's certainly not a direction that we're encouraging for ongoing content creation, but the option is still yours.

chris

 

[johnwhelan]

Hello,

I have been busy learning the fine points of Blender as I have been building models, using that program.

I made my first track. The roadbed includes normals and displacement mapping, which makes the gravel bumpy, rather than just a smooth surface.

Now, I have turned my attention to making trees and bushes.

I'm sure that anyone who has run the built-in routes in 2009, has noticed the poor state of the trees and bushes. As one rotates those things, they appear as if painted on glass panels. Moreover, the one sample tree provided, is not a very good model, to say the least.

Anyway, I think I'll stick with the crossed panels--I use a mesh plane, to which I apply the art work and the alpha channel.

There is no way of easily making trees and bushes, unless one has highly specialized software or has the time to devote to making trees and bushes for others. In the old days, one could have a fringe around the edge of a bush or tree, indicating the fuzzy boundary. Mesh based stuff requires at lot of additional work to make a bush or tree that is at least a reasonable facsimile of the real thing.

Otherwise, I like the higher resolution in 2009. Even so, I think Auran should have an option, in which one can use the old way of making vegitation.

Cheers,

srude

There is a fair amount of discussion in Trainzdev you might like to look through about various ways that people have tried to make trees for native mode in TS2009.

Cheerio John