Have ya all noticed that before? Has anyone attempted to work around it? What do ya mean transparent. Well not perfectly transparent just slightly like real life. Leaves are thin so light should shine threw a bit. Remember my flower in the humming bird picture? It looked fake a bit so I give it just a slight transparenty and wow what a difference. Then I notice all the leaves suffer the same fate really and you can't adjust the transparence of them because that channel has been taken up entirely with the mask function. I'm rendering right now but I have a idea on how to make it work and give try when it done. I'm just wondering if anyone noticed that before that's all.

I'm not sure I understood what you're meaning, but, if I did, you can also use the back-lighting (I don't know the exact word used in English Vue) on leaves material, you should have the effect you wanted... PS : I'm also not sure you'll understand my post... ;-) Argentium Thri'ile

Well put it this way, leaves in vue are like steel, no light can get threw them because the channel (transparency) is already taken up as a mask function. Now maybe I'm wrong and that's why I'm asking. See my flower looked fake because flowers are delicate thin structures and have a slight transparancy to them. So I can fix the flowers because there not masked (they're solid meshes) but I'm wondering is there anyway to do it with the Vue leaves also in Vue? Notice in the render the flower lets light threw but the leaves are well might as well be made out of steel really cause no light get threw.

The only other way that i can think to get the slightly transparent look is to make the alphas for the plants not 100% black. They cant be to light or they will look bad. i just tried to do this but I cant open the alphas to vues plants in PSP7. they are some format other than jpeg or bmp etc.. I am going to try to use the aphas for the exchange leaves that are in the free stuff are here because i know that i can open them.

Found the solution I think... Open the summary of materials and change the transparency funtion for the leave mat to "Clip under 10%" or 20% depending on the overall desired transparency of the leaf. Hope this helps.

They will not open because there black and white two channel saved as the wrong format. You could convert them to gif but hey don't worry about those ones. I bet if you play with the alpha channel you'll goof it up. There sensitive. There is no room for error on those beacue of the mask part. I was thinking though if they used 255 black for the mask you should beable to use 254 or 253 white for the leaf part. Oh learned the hard way. When making a alpha for a program make it two channel black and white then make it 8 bit color again and save. Everything will be able to open it then. It still will only have two colors.

Enforcer I'll have to try that. Good one I never would have thought of that. I was going to make a mixed material first layer the leaf with transperencey then the second material just doing the mask part. I still haven't tried it yet cause I'm still rendering a big picture. I just want slight transparency. That flower has got 5 % only and it made a huge difference. I've just noticed this before that because the leaves are so solid they don't look real sometimes. You put the sun behind any leaf on this planet and light will get threw. Some, a bit, but not none.

I think that enforcer is on the right track. The plant on the left has a filter that clips all transparency values under 10%. the plant on the right is normal.

Ya but back light it and render it again. It's the backlghting is when you notice. Have the shadow facing the camera and move it down (camera) lots so your almost looking up at the plants. You almost want the underside of the leaves. It's definitly looking better though.

Just edit the current transparency production filter, add a point to it, move the new point all the way to the left, and move it up and down to adjust the transparency. Moving the right side down, as some of the clipping filters are set, seems to reduce the transparency of the mask as a whole instead of just the intended leaf shape. Rich

The last picture did use the back light effect. Here is another try using the same filter. With a little more tweaking i think you could get very good results.

I'll try a few different methods here and post the results what works when. My render is almost done. That's pretty much got it though as far as I can tell.

Backlighting is there for exactly this. Leaves are not transparent in real life, they are translucent. The backlighting switch creates translucence, not transparency. Its also good for cloth etc. Note that backlighting is only available on single-sided materials.

Well, I was reason... back-lighting is what you're looking for... :-) If you really insist for getting leaves transparent, the easyest way is, as you suggested, to mix the leaves material with a 100 % transparent material. Then, you just have to vary the proportion of mixing for the effect you want... Argentium Thri'ile

Exactly as Zoon wrote. Here is the text from Vue.

Thanks, I new it was somewhere. You've answered my question completly.

I think the real problem is that the translucency for a leaf is not just a single flat color. Usually when you look at a leaf with a light shining through it you see a complex pattern formed by the veins in the leaf. Back lighting really does nothing to make the leaves look realistic, since there are no options to use a function on it and there is no way to vary the intensity of the backlighting. Actually a better way is to come up with a custom clip map with patterns on the clip mask for the leaf and put this mask in almost every channel: color transparency, etc. This would make the leaves look better by default. Also another thing I noticed is that using backlighting also exaggerates the edges and increases rendertimes, especially for forests from a distance. Turning off backlighting is a lot better. The best option would be to have a translucency channel added to the material editor. Wish I had thought of it for the wish list.....

Yep, you're reason, Dot', a translucency tab in material editor could be cool... you can try to mail to E-on for suggesting it, or maybe hope they'll think about it or that they will read this thread... Argentium Thri'ile

What exactly is a 'one-sided object' in vue talk? to me its a planar, eggshell mesh; but matching a planar face next to a squashed cube, not only does the backlighting work with the 2-sided cube, there's more to play with in terms of opacity starting out.

I think that one-sided object mean that only the external faces are rendered. Argentium Thri'ile

Remember this thread from the past? I used the same scene I was rendering before for my latest tutorial and was looking at the textures even closer. Back lighting was turned on, on all the leaves. I'm rendering a differnt picture right now but it's almost done. I'm going to reload that scene and pick it apart once and for all and figure out why the backlighting is not working as expected. You can't really tell from that tiny little picture I posted of it up there but the default Vue plants might as well be solid steel because no light what so ever is getting threw the leaves. You can't really tell on my leaves there but you sure notice the lack of effect on the default Vue ones.

Enforcer wins. His idea works just fine. Clip under 10% worked like a charm and I got the effect I was looking for. Good thing you suggested it cause I would have never thought that one up in a million years. I tried the idea of mixing materials with one turned slighty transparent and well scratch that idea cause the mask then no longer works properly. Just the back lighting alone was not enough, the leaves still looked too solid for me. They look fine now.