How would I make a Plant material?

anonymous_user_2fa582561 · June 8, 2014, 1:51pm

I have some trees and ferns and I want the leaves to glow on the underneath if light is shining on top (or if that is too hard then just glow on the opposite side to a light anyway).

I am sure this cant be too complicated but Im quite new to unreal and cant find anything much about this, I imagine it is similar to ice or a candle material where the opposite side is illuminated but I don’t know.

Thanks

Lovecraft_K · June 9, 2014, 3:19pm

Hi The Cheese Dragon -

Here is a basic, basic setup for a plant. You will want to use Subsurfacing as you lit model which allows you to plug in an opacity mask for you leaf shape and an opacity channel which determines how light passes through your leaves.

There are much more complicated ways of setting up your trees and I would highly recommend digging through some of the tree materials provided in the sample levels.

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

anonymous_user_923c79df · June 9, 2014, 8:57pm

Here you can also find a very good grass setup which you can also use for trees/bushes/…:

Also take a look at the blueprint office. There you can find a tree + material which will help you

anonymous_user_2fa582561 · June 9, 2014, 8:51pm

Ok ill try that thanks

anonymous_user_2fa582561 · June 9, 2014, 10:18pm

I have done it using your original suggestion I think, works like a dream! my tree has individual leaves and 37286 vertices in total which looks great but is no nice on my computer so I guess I should think about optimizing at some point… that will be a headache

this didn’t work so well on my ferns on the ground as the light doesn’t shine exactly through them and I don’t want them to glow because i fancy the idea of day night cycles.

thanks