Bryce 7.

1 Pro ― Tree Foliage

Tree Foliage
Depending on the type of tree, the leaves are not completely opaque to
light. A back lit oak leaf is bright on the opposite side but a leaf from a
downy oak is not. To make a tree look natural, this must be considered.

Introduction
Plant leaves are thin and contain water. If they are backlit, some light comes out on the other
side coloured. This is not transparency because what is behind the leaf cannot be seen. We
call this translucency because the light passing through is scattered and also bent by refraction
from the water inside the leaf. The amount of translucency differs: needles on a coniferous
tree are thick, the leaf of a downy oak leathery on the topside and hairy on the underside so
there is not a lot of light shining through — if at all.

Above are three photographic examples to illustrate this. All show backlit trees, the sun is be-
hind the trees as the shadows on the ground indicate. The side near to the beholder is darker
and lit by the ambient light and to a small part by the light that passes through the leaves.
In order to render plausible vegetation in Bryce (or any other 3D application) this behaviour
must be emulated if the tree is lit from behind or a side, it is less important if it is illuminated
from the front.
If the plant used in Bryce has the foliage made of true 3D-meshes this can be easily accom-
plished. There are several applications that create plants with mesh foliage like Bryce or
Arbaro, for example. Other programs use flat 2D-faces for the foliage which has the form of
the leaf as an alpha channel like many Xfrog plants. Such foliage needs much less memory
than meshes but Bryce cannot use the alpha channel to give the leaf the form and make it
translucent at the same time. Luckily, it can be approximated to some extent.
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3D-Mesh Leaf Translucency

Most of the Bryce trees have 3D-mesh leaves. To make things simple, we compare the use of
the Transparency control with transparency controlled by a texture. The left setup is used for
the left part and the right for the right part of the simple renders that follow below.

The common parts are the Diffuse colour and the Diffusion setting at 5 boosted by a one
component Phased Hyper Texture (PHT). This assures that we have enough brightness. Then
there is a bit of a grainy Bump, Specularity is at 100 and Specular Halo grey 204. The main
difference is that Transparency at left is set to 30 (%) and at right at 0 and controlled by a
texture that creates 30% of transparency.
All examples have the sun at Azimuth 0°, Altitude 15° and the camera looks in the direction of
the sun. Therefore, the 2D-faces and the leaves are backlit. There are two similar trees with
only one leaf with the Default shape. The leaf at left has the same material as the 2D-face at
left, and the leaf at right the same as the 2D-face at right. The material is the same as shown
above left and right.

Refraction 100 (air) Refraction 0 Refraction 133 (water)

The only difference between the three images is the Refraction setting. Refraction 100 makes
the objects fully transparent with the colour set for Diffuse. The Bump does not show up. The
brightness and colour of the leaves almost matches the one of the 2D-faces.
With Refraction set to 0, only the light coloured by Diffuse shines through the objects and
Bump is visible (enlarge in your viewing program). With Refraction at 0, transparency becomes
translucency. This is the simplest setting to get translucent leaves. However, Diffuse colour and
Diffusion may have to be adjusted a bit for the leaves to get the same colour and brightness.
Refraction 133 blurs the background that shines through the object a bit and bump gets
visible. The 3D-mesh leaves lose a lot of the light shining through and Diffusion was tripled
from 5 to 15 to get about the same amount of light shining through them.

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Refraction 100 (air) Refraction 0 Refraction 133 (water)

Trice the same render with different Refraction settings — transparent at left, translucent at the
centre and water at right. However, there is a difference in colour on the left and right side of
each picture above. At left, Transparent colour was set to red and at right Volume colour was
set to red.
Looking at the 2D-faces we can see how the red is added at left but not at right. A 2D-face is
not a 3D-mesh, it is just a surface. The leaves are 3D-meshes and hence take the colour from
Volume and almost nothing from the Transparent colour.
Volume and Diffuse colours mix and change the overall brightness of the light shining through.
Volume colour (and Transparent colour for a 2D-face) colour the shadows cast. This is some-
thing not observed in nature. The shadow cast from translucent leaves is neutral, just less dark
than the shadow from the trunk and branches on the ground.
My tests do not show a difference between adjusting the Transparency control and using a
texture to control Transparency that is kept at 0. The important bit is that Refraction should be
set to 0. It may be argued that in a real leaf there is water and therefore a refractive index of
1.33 appropriate. If the aim is to get translucency without diming the light three fold,
Refraction 133 is not a wise choice and Refraction 0 is the preferred way.
Keeping Volume colour white and providing colour via Diffuse appears to be better than add
or use Volume colour, Transparent colour has no effect — do not be fooled by what the Mat
Lab preview shows. A bit of high frequency Bump is not amiss, neither some Specularity.

3D-Mesh Leaf Scatter

This is another method to create a
translucency effect that relies on
blurred transmissions. Blurry Trans-
mission is controlled by the Specular
Halo value. Refraction can be kept at
100. All settings and example results
stay nearly the same. The important
bit here is that Specular Halo must
be at least 160 grey but not exceed
254; default 204 is quite good.
Premium renders can take longer than Regular ones, but not always if the Antialiasing pass is
also considered. In fact, Premium at 9 or 16 Rays per pixel can be faster. If Soft Shadows are
needed, which is usually the case for outdoor renders, Premium is the only choice anyway.
A drawback may be if other transparent parts are in the scene, like lake water that has some
specular, the surface either gets almost uniformly bright or — if Halo is reduced — lacks
specular reflection and those have to be boosted with a PHT.

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2D-Face Translucency
Unfortunately, this does not work but it can be approximated. The reason is that a couple of
controls in the Mat Lab are switched off and do not work if Blend Transparency is used.
Blend Transparency takes the alpha channel from the picture texture and the Transparency
control can be left at zero but a dot from the picture texture must be used. Refraction is
disabled and it does not matter whether it is set to 0 or 300. Though Transparency can be
added by adjusting the control, Transparent and Volume colour are not honoured anymore;
they can be set to any colour, even black.

Specular and Specular Halo do work, but if rendered Premium with Blurry Transmissions, there
will be no blurriness. Therefore, setting Transparency higher than 0 will make the object
transparent like glass, what is behind it can be seen. There is no way to make the object
translucent. The colour is exclusively governed by Diffuse and Diffusion (and Ambient and
Ambience, but using these is seldom a wise choice). A bit of fine Bump is helpful.
The more Transparency added, the more the colour gets washed out, it loses saturation and
this can be balanced with the Diffusion setting.
The settings for the four example renders below are almost identical and as shown in the Mat
Lab picture above. At left a 2D-face with the Diffuse colour of the leaf; at right the leaf texture
from the Xfrog EU26_M_European-Beech.

Counting from left, the first example has the Material Option Normal and the second as well
but has no dot set for Transparency. The third example has the Mat Lab settings as above and
Material Options set to Blend Transparency; this is the correct setting. The last example is like
the third one but has no dot set for Transparency.
The third example is the correct one but we can see the transition between the ground plane
and the sky at the horizon with only 25% of additional transparency. This is the best we can
do because neither Refraction nor Blurry Transmissions work. A bit of Bump helps. However, as
unsatisfactory as this looks, it is not that bad in a “real” render. We are looking at the extremes
here.

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The following are less theoretical examples. At left the Xfrog EU26_M_European-Beech tree
with the original material on the leaves as shown below at left. At right, a copy of this tree with
the leaf material as shown above with small changes. The sun is the only light source; Diffusion
and Specular are both always 200, Altitude 20°. Diffusion for the leaves is boosted by a one
component PHT.

The sun is in the zenith, so Altitude is 90°; Transparency 33% and Diffusion 4.0.

At left, the sun is at Azimuth 0°, the trees backlit; Transparency 50% and Diffusion 10.0. At
right the sun at 180°, the trees lit directly from the front; Transparency 25% and Diffusion 3.5.

At left, the sun is at 240°, light comes from the left front; Transparency 33% and Diffusion 3.0.
At right the sun at 120°, light from right front; Transparency 33% and Diffusion 4.0.

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Diffuse Colour
All examples use only a simple colour for Diffuse. It is still possible to make the Diffuse colour
a bit more elaborate. For foliage with 3D-meshes this is quite obvious since everything in the
Mat Lab works. For foliage made from 2D-faces, Diffuse also works as usual and textures in
channel 1 and 2 can be blended with a texture in channel 3. Below is a simple example.

The material used for all leaves is the one above shown at centre except that each left tree has
Transparency at 0. For the left picture, the sun is at Azimuth 75° and for the right picture at
285°. The Altitude is the same at 20°.

Conclusion
None of the example uses ambient light to brighten up the parts unlit by the sun which has
fully black shadows. A dome light, an HDRI, or even a simple radial light or a parallel light with
infinite width at or near the camera location is still needed to make the scene look right.
However, the aim here was to show that some means of translucency can greatly enhance
how foliage looks. With 3D-mesh leaves it is a simple matter, with 2D-face leaves it is a bit of a
compromise; Transparency and Diffusion must be carefully balanced. The farther away the
plant is from the camera, the easier it gets. Close-ups are more difficult to get right.
What this document has omitted to discuss is using True Ambience (TA) to render translucent
foliage. Transparent objects render slow and even more so with TA. At only 4 Rays per pixel
render time is about 5 times of a regular one. Actually, translucency comes at a price. 3D-
mesh translucency takes about 30 times longer than without, 2D-face leaves without faked
translucency about 10 times longer than without the alpha cutting, and if translucency is used,
this makes the render over 50 times longer than a simple regular one. Looking at the bright
side, in most cases the foliage does not take up the full render window.
It is important to be aware that the optics options in the Mat Lab work differently if Blend
Transparency is activated in the Material Options. As for 3D-mesh leaves, it appears that setting
Refraction to 0 is the more versatile option than using Blurry Transmissions; after all, Blurry
Transmissions is a global option.

PHT – Phased Hyper Texture

A Hyper Texture creates values beyond the usual 0 to 255 range and since the render engine
can handle such high values, it has many uses. A PHT can be created in the Deep Texture
Editor (DTE) with a few clicks — positive and negative as well as a one-component, two- or
three-component one. There is a PDF document on my website under: Bryce & 3D CG
Documents > Mine (PDF) > Material > Phased Hyper Texture (direct link
https://www.horo.ch/docs/mine/pdf/PhasedHT.pdf).

May 2017/horo

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