Fern

ok so recently i have been experimenting with opacity to make foliage.

here is a quick fern i did. (these shots were rendered in blender and print screened)



The main use when using opacity is to cut down on polygons. If i was to have made this completely of polygons , including each individual leaf indent, the numbers would be too high for use in a real-time application. instead i made this fern like so:

After a quick mess around with alpha maps , i made a simple plane and turned on transparent shadows which allows the shadows to be generated by the texture instead of the model, like so:


Notice it only has 160 faces in total. The texture uses an alpha map to tell which part of it is transparent.

The Alpha map consists of black and white.

black is transparent.
white is opaque.

simple really.