Trees / Leaves & Transparency

[Timmydog1984]

Hello,

I've set up some trees in Octane. I've used the diffuse shader with the albedo texture affecting both the diffuse and transmission inputs, which gives nice results. The shape of each leaf is cut out using a texture in the opacity slot. Unfortunately however, it seems that using an opacity map increases the render time of my scene massively. It's around 15 X faster to render if i remove the opacity texture.

Is there a solution to make this more efficient? Or is the solution just to use huge amounts of geometry to create the leaf shapes? Sadly the trees i'm working on have pine type leaves (lots of needles!), so i fear the geometry count might be massive!

Any help would be hugely appreciated!

Cheers

[calus]

I've set up some trees in Octane. I've used the diffuse shader with the albedo texture affecting both the diffuse and transmission inputs, which gives nice results. The shape of each leaf is cut out using a texture in the opacity slot. Unfortunately however, it seems that using an opacity map increases the render time of my scene massively. It's around 15 X faster to render if i remove the opacity texture.

Is there a solution to make this more efficient? Or is the solution just to use huge amounts of geometry to create the leaf shapes? Sadly the trees i'm working on have pine type leaves (lots of needles!), so i fear the geometry count might be massive!

Right, I guess path tracers are much faster to deal with ray intersection for real geometry than for opacity maps.

The more efficient way to deal with leaf is to use detailed geometry instances with no opacity map, fast to render and lightweight.