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!

[Thomas Holm]

Thanks, Dwight! No need for my glass core, then.
But you say I can do the same in Archicad? No invisible shader there?

[Dwight]

I sent you some leaves to use that are already masked. Select "transparent" under alpha channel and you will be fine.

[Thomas Holm]

BIG thanks, Dwight! I'll test that ASAP!

[Dwight]

RE: Ivy Generator FREE utility.

Wow!!!

The ivy can be simplified. Each leaf is a UV oriented rectangle with masked leaf applied.
The import to Artlantis does not bring the material in, but the label is there and it is a three step process to map the leaves.

Get this and restore ugly buildings to beauty!