Rendering 2D/Billboard Plants?

[Spectralis]

Some of the scenes I've bought from Renderosity use 2D/Billboard plants and trees. When I render them using Reality in DAZ Studio they render as plants/trees but in DAZ Octane the actual boards show as black squares in the viewfinder and render. Can I make Octane ignore the black boards and just render the plants/trees? I hope I've explained this problem clearly.

My other question is to do with animation. DAZ automatically creates 30 fps animations but film is 24 fps. Does it make much difference if I render animations at 24 fps? Will they look as good as 30 fps animations? Those extra six frames soon mount up over a few minutes of animation creating longer render times.

[t_3]

... most probably the opacity map wasn't applied when the octane material was created. given you have enough free slots for maps (since there is a limit which you can check in the system tab), you need to edit the octane material. if there is no image/floatimage type node in the opacity pin of the material, you need to open it in the nge, change the type of this pin to image or floatimage*) and look in the textures menu for the right map. you can also right-click somewhere in the nge and select "import maps", the plugin then creates image/floatimage nodes for any of the maps in the daz shader - connect the opacity map and delete the rest.

*) preferrably floatimage (=grayscale map), but since the limit for them is lower, you might need to use an image (=rgb map) instead. both will work, only rgb needs some more vram of course.

regarding the fps: it depends on; from a motion viewpoint 24fps is of course still ok. 30fps - apart from historical aspects as being ~ ntsc framerate*) - is targeting computer displays or plasma/lcd tv's, as they usually have a native refresh rate of 60fps (or even 120). this means that you have a frame change every 2nd screen refresh, or in other words an even factor between them. if you have a 24fps source format, somewhere between the video file and the display some intermediate frames need to be calculated (or some frames just shown twice - depends on the player/codec), to match the target refresh rate. the speed of course stays the same.

imo a lower fps rate is absolutely ok if it saves notable amounts of render time; rendered images are usually that crisp and clean, that some fps upscaling (or size up/downscaling) won't hurt, and in general you will hardly ever see a difference...

*) btw ntsc is actually 29.98fps and 24p film uses 23.976fps. video/film fps along with ar and size aspects have some strange aspects to them; where they come from, why they were or are used, and how to convert between them...

[Spectralis]

Thanks for your indepth reply. I'll try to edit the material and see what happens. Regarding the fps I'll create a short animation at 24 and at 30 fps to see if I can tell any difference but as you say any differences will probably be imperceptible. Saving 6 fps in a 4 minute animation (1440 frames) definitely seems worth trying. At 24 fps, 1440 frames equals a minute of animation.