No more billboard lighting issues
Billboard lighting issue I have just discovered isn't SP1, it's the settings used in the modeller, I've been messing with hedges on and off for a year or two now messed with various entries in the texture.txt and never really solved the lighting issue, until ocemy's hedge came along which doesn't have the problem. Optimistically I tried mine in SP1 HF3, still had the problem and although not as bad the problem still exists.
So examining ocemys hedge.
Looking at the texture.txt he's just using a standard texture.txt without any other entries other than the alpha, this indicated to me that it's something in the mesh settings when exporting. So revisited my efforts and started experimenting, the answer is to drop the diffuse colour to black or close to, that gets rid of the lighting issue. so Ambient = white, Diffuse=black and Specular=black seems to work for me. probably some slight adjustments may work ok as this was a quick and dirty test. This might help someone hopefully?
By the way this is using Gmax with the max4 exporter, haven't tried 3ds yet but I'm assuming it may be similar, hedges were made a while back so used what mesh I had I had to hand to mess with.
Same settings also work on billboard type bushes, next to try is embankment splines which I'm assuming it should also fix.
Hedge experiment screen shot here, now looks exactly the same from any angle or direction. No Lod yet, need to work on that and ocemy's method would seem to be the way to go. However as it is without Lod it's not causing me any problems.