I just purchased Xfrog Europe 2 plants and tried converting some plants to 3ds fomat using Xfrog 3.5. The plant exported fine. However, after importing the plant in Vue, the leaves looked like colored paper.

A sample render has been attached.

How can I make these plants look like real plants?

Well that blows some serious chunks.........;(  I would check to ensure that the alpha map that goes with the leaves is being applied.  The leaves/needles look like they dont have the alpha applied and therefore looks like large flat planes.  Hope this helps you.

G&C

There is indeed a problem with especially the techique XFrog uses for transparency. They use tif files for their textures with embedded transparency IN the tif file (which i doubt follows the tif standards, it is a derivate of the format). And this Vue does not read correctly. But you can correct it. Open the material editor for this leaf material(s) and switch the editor to the simple mode (not advanced editor mode). There you should have three previews only (more or less). To the left you see the map for the leaves, the middle is the related bump map and to the right you see the transparency map. There you select the little tick "use texture as transparency" and then it should work as you expected it. I am sorry if i have not used the exact right words for the menu expressions, i am at home right now without Vue installation and do it completely out of my head. Can't double check.

Hi, i also use xfrog plants in vue 4 and 5 resp. by checking the materials you will easily find that the leaf/needle texture is NOT using the embedded alpha of the (standard or not) color texture! For the transparency it points to a separate texture (something like texturename_a.tif) due to getting rid of problems related to non-standard color bitmaps. Anyway, you could check the options in the transparency section of the leaf-material, if they are set correctly...

Attached Link: xfrog

I have found this problem with a few of the xfrog plants and its no problem to get to work in Vue. :)

Thank you all. My problems have been solved once again.

OK. Now I am having another problem. I tried the method where the color map is used as an alpha. Here are the settings:

However, these settings are messed up after I click OK. When I return to the material editor, this happens:

This only happens with XFrog plants.

In your first screenshot the transparency map is NOT the copor map but a specific transparency information. The color map has a sort of general gray level that is interpretated as transparent of course too. And makes the whole thing a little transparent. In this case i think there is a specific transparent bitmap somewhere, often has an extention of the name ".._a" or "..._trans"  You should look for that.

What else can be is that the transparency channel in the tif file that's used for the color map here is missing. Can you check those tif files in something like Photoshop?

I don't see any transparency files. All I see is color maps of the leaves with a white background.

what plant is it? Maybe there is a small chance that i or someone else has it as well and can double check.

I load the TIF colormap in a picture editor, freebee Fastone Image Viewer works fine, adjust the "Brightness-Contrast" settings all the way down, reduce the color depth to 2, invert the image and save the result as "filename"TR.tif (TR added for my own convenience), that way I get a transmap for the leaves that is recognized and will stay recognized by VUE. 

I think there is a transparency channel in each of the TIF files. When I opened a TIF file in Microsoft Picture Manager, I saw the leaves without the white background. I suppose Vue is at fault here.

This problem occurs with any Xfrog plant.

Attached Link: Xfrog Tutorial Link

Wow, so much chaos for Xfrog. I'll check out the tutorial.

The easiest way to export XFrog plants in Vue without falling into this transmap issue, is to export in .lwo format, instead of obj or 3ds.

You'll get another problem though, but easier to fix: the shading of a lwo object in Vue is set to 100% diffuse + 40% ambient, which will make your object emit light. Change the diffuse back to 60% and you're set.