I'm currently having fun trying to come up with a generic Poser shader to use on the one-sided transmapped leaves of all those old trees and plants in my library.
The main problems I've had with the default materials are:
1) they usually have a single texture map of just one leaf, so every leaf looks identical (except perhaps in size).
2) the bump map (if there is one) is usually just a greyscale version of the texture, so the veins are usually raised.
3) they're usually transmapped onto a single square, so they're flat.
4) the underside of a real leaf is often distinctly different from the topside.
5) most leaves are translucent in real life
An old "
any thread discussing waxy leaf surface shader ?" thread on Renderosity gave me some ideas and prompted some questions, so I reopened it!
Here's my first complete test render (2000x2119 raw Poser 9 Firefly render).
The rock, ivy and trees are from DMs Druid Valley. I've only modified the shaders for the trunk and leaves of the ivy and trees.
Environment is my worldball/northern forest, plus a flat grassy groundplane that I've been playing with.
Lighting is one infinite with ray-traced shadows (above the camera, 40 degrees elevation) plus IDL (no diffuse IBL used).
1hr 15min for the IDL pass, 2hr for the render, total 3h 15min
I'll probably upload a few additional images tomorrow: the leaf shader; the trunk shader; my light settings; my render settings; a version of the render using the original materials for comparison.
Most of my testing has been with this ivy, and I'm quite pleased with it. However, the same shaderapplied to the leaves on the trees (with a different texture/transparency image of course) doesn't seem so good,and shows some problems I hadn't spotted with the ivy: the transparency map should also be plugged into Specular_Value; the amount of displacement should probably be greater for larger leaves. « Less
