As an artist, I love outdoor terrains populated with hundreds of unique trees, shrubs and hundreds more of "grass" clusters.
Is there a tutorial, somewhere, that explains how to bring these kinds of meshes, (and place them as desired), into the 3DRad environment, complete with properly imaged and aligned transparent leaf billboards?
Thanks,
Greg Smith
ok, first! if you want billboards you need to define a skinmesh for each billboard, or use imposters. transparency bring problems and dosnt work "just like that", I would risk to say that use different skinmeshes in billboard mode and have the transparency working right at the same time is virtually impossible.
you could solve this "billboards & transparency" challenge using a function dear fellow MikeHense did to manage imposters rendering them in the adequate order to make transparency work. see it here:
http://www.3drad.com/forum/index.php?topic=1236.0 look for Zorder.
HOWEVER! it only works with 1 skinmesh imposters, if you want 2 types of plants/leafs then you are screwed. in fact, this zorder solution would work with imposters for a single 1 skinmesh and thats all, interfering with everyother skinmesh transparency around, imposter or not.
so if your artist ambitions goes beyhond one kind of leaf/billboard/transparency you better forget it, it wont work.
about bringing 'em in, there's no "easier" way, just the default way to import skinmeshes and put 'em in scene, which you can take a look here
http://www.3drad.com/importing.phpgood luck
