Maintain Window Transparency with Plant Materials

[Anonymous]

I have seen some other references to issues with plant materials being solved using Physical Render as opposed to Cinerender. I have not yet tried that but my problems seem to be that the "bounding box" if the plant material seems to change the transparency of the window behind it. I also ave noticed that the specific Palm Tree out of the standard library that I am using seems to need to be replaced with each new view as it only seems to be visible in 2D. Attached is an image of the render and the 3d view.

Any suggestions are appreciated....

[jameshart]

Our rendering settings file (in case anyone would like to take a peek.)

[jameshart]

UPDATE:

Lowering the Ray Depth to 3 fixed the problem with the windows, but then introduced a new problem because some trees now render black.

[Erwin Edel]

Ray depth is about how many layers of transparancy you want to pass through. 3 is the bare minium, as anything with a thickness and transparant material has already two layers. If you have some overlapping trees, ramp up the number accordingly. 200 and 500 values are overkill. For most of my exterior renders I am fine with setting reflection and ray depth around 12. I keep treshold at 0, as this just makes reflections look better for only a slight increase in render times ussually.

I do not use any of the billboard objects, though. I either use 3d objects or the cutout contour objects. The problem is with the alpha channel / mask of those trees. It is just a rectangular picture with a transparant background, but you are still getting bits of the rectangle showing up / messing with things.

I seem to recall this was better or worse with either using physical renderer or not using it.

[Erwin Edel]

Just did a test render with some of those billboard trees, I can't say I am noticing any artifacts other than your typical poor/ugly masking of the picture where you notice white edges.

[jameshart]

Thanks Erwin! Yes, you are correct, bumping up the Ray Depth will fix the problem with the transparent trees, but it causes the problem with the windows. Normally use a higher ray depth, but because of the window problem I don't know what to do.

What are the cutout contour objects that you were mentioning? The object shown in the rendering is Deciduous Trees 20.

[Erwin Edel]

The 3D contour people. There are no trees there.

Not sure what the problem with the windows is, but higher depth should only make them look more like they should.

If you find it too dark, try putting a general light set to infinite strength inside the building. Don't forget to turn on the light setting in cinerender when using that.