Best way to render trees without leaves

[Macker]

Hi all,

I've got a particular head-scratcher here that I've got an idea of how to achieve, though I thought it'd be worth running it past everyone here to see if there's a better/more efficient way.

I've got a site that I'm having to produce images of that shows the growth of trees at certain years (for the purposes of fighting a planning application). The client initially wanted to show the tree growth at year 1, year 5 and year 10 and as such the scene is set up with a forest pro object for each year scattering various tree species that have been either scaled or chosen to represent various years of growth.

The issue is that the client now wants to show the trees in winter, without leaves on.

What is the best/fastest way to achieve this?

Edit the source geometry? Edit the leaf materials opacity to pure black?


Thanks in anticipation...!

[OPEN_RANGE]

I have done it before by editing the leaf material. I think I did change the opacity to black or maybe I swapped out the opacity map that achieved it or possible both. seems like way easier than editing the geometry

[Macker]

Just for future reference, if anyone else needs to attempt this, here's what I did:

• I took the original leaf materials (which themselves were quite complex) and put them inside a Vray Switch material.
• Within the switch material I also created a "blank" material which had a pure white VRay Colour map in the opacity slot.
• To control which of these two materials were to be rendered, I used another VRay Colour Map in the Vray Switch Material as a control. This setup was then repeated (with the vray colour map instanced) on every single other leaf material in the scene.
  
  Because the Vray Colour map was instanced, it allowed me to switch on/off the leaves on every single tree in the scene by merely changing the colour. The time consuming part of this was the setup, but once it's done it works perfectly.