alpha channels

[mikeh]

I've noticed this before and am just re-mentioning it. I am building up a library of 3d plants and made a california pepper using tif images of a compound leave for the leaves. It took 12 minutes to render.(too long) so i got rid of the tif images and replaced them with mapped geometry of compound leaves (which has way more polys) and it rendered in 1.5 minutes. The reults of each look pretty much the same, just that one would expect the less polys to render faster but the tif maps with alpha channels really hit vray render times. I'm happy not using tif maps. it's just an observation.
mh

[ene.xis]

lots of threads run discussed this already...but yeah better vertices than alphas rendering time wise...
another option would be to reduce to the maximum the opacity surface...

if u do a search there was a thread about tree leaves and some good tool by joconnell if i remember right!