Proxies and shadow casting problem

[peerman]

Hello,

I have a tree that I converted to a vrmesh. Leafs are planes with a transparent texture applied to them.
The tree renders nice except for one thing. The leafs don't receive shadows. I have also made a simple plane with the same leaf material that does receive shadows.
I tried all sorts of settings but so far no good. When I turn off the transparency for the leafs, the planes do receive shadows!
It looks like the leafs only receive the GI light but not the direct light.
Bug or some kind of setting I'm missing here?
I added some screenshots. One without transparency and one with it turned on. Lighting comes from the standard environment, I turned GI off so you can see the difference much better.
Any help would be appreciated!

Regards,
Peter

[peerman]

OK, So I think I found the solution. I turned off enable double-sided mode in the UVW settings of the leafbitmap. Now it renders fine!

[andybot_cg]

Yeah, I've had issues with leaf maps with proxies too, vfs treats UV mapping 2 sided, whereas some other programs (like Blender) don't. Thus sometimes the back side UV mapping is messed up - which is particularly bad with maps with transparency. I'll have to take a look at this checkbox - it may be the solution I was looking for before.

[tedvitale]

Peter,

You should also think about using the V-Ray 2 Sided material to add more realism. If you apply the 2 sided material to the leaf, you'll get a very nice translucent effect to your leaves.

[peerman]

Ted, thanks for the tip! I found some great tutorials online, so will try those out.
@Andy, hope it helps for your problems as well!

[andybot_cg]

Thank you!! Just tried it, and this was the fix I was looking for back in February! You made my day

Yes, 2-sided material is a must for foliage. Make sure you use the "Two Sided" and NOT the "Skp Two Sided" to set up your material.

Attached are before and after example renders of the problem I was running into with trees brought in from the "Tree[d]" program that have mapping on only one side of the leaf.