Forest Pack > Forest Pro (*)

Tree Darkening Problem

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Mike Truly:
I have this problem quite often and I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong or what can be done about it.

I create a wide view of trees (for example in a mountain scene) and there are thousands of trees but they are very dark looking... almost black.  The material used is a standard MAX material using trees from the Forest Pro library.  The material is 100% self illuminated, yet the trees are almost black.  The nearer trees look OK but a little dark.  The far trees seem to look black.

Attached is an image showing what I get.  I can adjust the Output rollout of the bitmap but have not really found the ideal settings yet.

Thanks for any ideas!

iToo:
Hi Mike,

I just done a test scene using a material 100% self illuminated, but i don't get that black trees (and the texture that i've used is very dark).

Please, send me your scene to play a bit with it (only trees, camera, lights and so).

DIMITRIS:
I have a photo that looks exactly like your black trees... It can be partially a contrast issue that fools the eye... I would like to see a blowup rendering of your scene, then it might be clear.
Our admin didn't use snow for the test so that's why there is such big difference...
Maybe I'm wrong but I think this is important too.

iToo:
Yes, it may be a optical effect too. Please see this photo:

http://sinope.redjupiter.com/images/bobrat/RotationofResizeofff007.jpg

Mike Truly:
Carlos and all,

Thanks for the ideas.  Actually, that image just looks like snow but is actually just a light blue background with the terrain hidden.

Attached is a zipfile with the FP trees and other items.  The terrain is not included as it's gigantic and I can't share that.

It may be an optical illusion as the scenes I create are very large.  I have found a work around by using a falloff map in the diffuse slot which will use the tree bitmaps near and just a solid color far away (the tree OMAP is still being used for far away).  This allows the far trees to show up brighter with color.  But it seems to be an issue of many tree bitmaps at far distances turning black because my 'falloff' method shows that color can be shown at long distances.  You'll also see that I have cranked the video level of the bitmaps to try to get them to be brighter.  (If you turn off the video level back to 1.0, you'll see the trees get darker).

Thanks for looking at this!

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