Better Looking Foliage

[Traveler]

Better Looking Foliage
By Traveler
I stumbled across this while playing around with the Alternate Diffuse method of fixing plants, and while I find the Alt Diffuse method good, (Which I will show you below as well), There is a better solution (IMHO). I am sure this can be expanded on, so if you take this method and come up with something better... please let us know! This is a plant with transmapped foliage. One Light, Depth Mapped Shadows. See how there are dark spots where the back of the transmapped planes are facing towards the camera? That looks pretty ugly, LOL

Now, one way to fix this is to disable the normal diffuse, and plug your map into the Alternate Diffuse Socket.
This is the set-up for an Alternate Diffuse fix:

Notice that I have unplugged the Image Map from the Standard Diffuse Socket, and have set the Diffuse Value to 0 (Zero)
When I render I get the following:

While it does look better, I find it kind of flat and too bright. What I would really like is a mixture of the two effects. And there is a way to do just that!
In the Material Room, I plug the Texture map back into the Diffuse Socket. Set the Diffuse value to 0.5. Then I set the Alternate Diffuse color to 50% Grey (HSV Value of 127,127,127 in the color picker)
50% Grey in the color Picker (50% Grey is the far left grey box in the 2nd row at the bottom)

Ok, So when I render I get this:

Definitly better, but we can take it one more level with a little specularity
Here is my set-up in the Material Room:

I have plugged the texture map into the spec color, set the spec color box to a light grey, and set the highlight size to 0.3
When I render I get this:

For a final renderish sort of thing, I added in an IBL with no AO and changed the angle of my main light... here is the result:

End Notes: There are a few things you can do to play around with this basic set-up. You can: Change the strength of the Diffuse, keeping in mind the higher you go the darker the dark spots are going to be. You can change the grey color on the alt diffuse box, and there the lighter you go the brighter the overall effect will be. You can also play around with the spec settings, or use and alt spec set-up. You can add bump, etc. Loads of different things can be done with this. So Experiment and plase show us what you come up with!
Enjoy!

[romax]

This is indispensable! Thank you so much!