Archicad -> Artlantis 2 hedge render shortcut?

[Thomas Holm]

I'm trying to do a decent Artlantis render representation of a garden adjacent to a house design I'm working on.

In this garden, I have some hedges, designed to be fairly dense and more-or-less regular in shape (to be cut once a year by the non-existent gardener, I suppose 🙂

To render these in Artlantis has become an issue. I can't use true 3D artlantis bush objects, because including perhaps 400+ of these increases polygon count to unusable amounts and bogs down even the fast Artantis2. Billboards look too crappy and are hard to get to mimic the forms I want.

My idea now is to create the hedges in Archicad with the wall or slab tool and a transparent glass body, and then assign a texture with leaves (and some alpha channel holes) at least to the top and sides of the hedges. I think this would give enough realism - I don't need more than to trigger the client's fantasy enough to sell the design 😉

I'd like to know if someone has any ideas on how to manage this best. I'd prefer doing the texture attachment in Archicad, so that it survives revisions and re-exports to Artlantis without reference file worries etc, but I'm really not sure how to to it the best and if the texture and it's mappings really would survive the travel to Artlantis.

I'm even not sure how to map a texture (material) to the surfaces of a wall or slab in Archicad and not change the transparent glass core? Is Custom profiled walls the way to go, even if the profile is just rectangular?
Or is it simply better to re-map in Artlantis?

I'm thankful for any ideas on how to make this work!

[Dwight]

The Archicad hedge isn't too bad.

Or, yes, an array of leaf parts on a slab Let the top be flat but jiggy up the sides a little.

[Thomas Holm]

Dwight wrote:
Or, yes, an array of leaf parts on a slab Let the top be flat but jiggy up the sides a little.

Oh Guru Dwight would you please elaborate a little on how you did this?

[Dwight]

The hedge shown is the Archicad hedge.

If you want to put leaf parts on a slab, just get some pictures of leaves, assemble them in Photoshop, use a mask to have some transparency.
This will transfer to Artlantis.

[Thomas Holm]

Dwight wrote:
The hedge shown is the Archicad hedge.

If you want to put leaf parts on a slab, just get some pictures of leaves, assemble them in Photoshop, use a mask to have some transparency.
This will transfer to Artlantis.

OK. The hedge looks good, but it's got all those polygons - I hope the texture on flat surface would render faster.

[Dwight]

Yes it will render faster.

It seems like you have both solutions at hand.

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

What about the stuff creeping up the columns? Is that the 'ivy generator'?

[Dwight]

ivy generator? Wow - looked it up there's another afternoon gone to the dogs.


That image is an invisible cylinder with a masked bitmap of leaves.

This is easy in Archicad or Artlantis, but Photoshop is where the image and masking happens.

Make some vines climb in a blank image, and mask out the background. This means a large map with a large coverage, say, the height of the column.

Okay??

[Thomas Holm]

Dwight wrote:
That image is an invisible cylinder with a masked bitmap of leaves.
This is easy in Archicad or Artlantis, but Photoshop is where the image and masking happens.
Make some vines climb in a blank image, and mask out the background. This means a large map with a large coverage, say, the height of the column.

Well that's pretty much exactly what I'm aiming at with my hedge...
How did you make the cylinder invisible while showing the image mask?

[Dwight]

In Artlantis, you apply the invisible shader, like always.
Then the image.