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Vegetation Shader

Vegetation Shader

For all objects that are placed as Vegetation Object you need to take vegetation shader in your mtl file. 

To open the materail dialog do left click on your object in the vegetation list and press "go to object material" 

Most time you will use submaterials, open it and select you render geometry. 

Material Settings:

Here you select your shader and surfacetype. 

 

 

  • Shader

Select Vegetation Shader. 

This opens special settings for vegetation objects. 

 

 

  • Surface Type

 

Select mat_canopy (or what ever you want) 

The surfacetype difines what partikle and sound effect which will be shown on collision. 

Other changes are not needed. 

Opacity Settings:

Here you can activate alpha channel for any texture which has one. 

 

 

  • ALpha Test

 

Always stay around 50. 

Play around with this value, you will see what happens. 

Opacity can activate alpha blend, but for vegetation its to expansive as long as you want to use sahdows. 

Other changes are not needed. 

Lighting Settings

Here you can tweak difuse and specular color. 

 

 

  • Diffuse Color

 

Make sure that the difuse color is always as close to 128,128,128 as possible. 

Make as much color corection as possible in your texture. 

Diffuse color is only for variations. 

 

 

  • Specular Color

 

Here you tweak the strangth of you specual color. 

 

 

  • Glossiness

 

Tweak the gloss level of your spec. 

Other changes are not needed. 

 

Textures:

Here you can assign your textures like diffuse, normal and specmap 

 

 

  • Diffuse map:

 

RGB should contain diffuse color. 

Alpha should contain opacity (used for alpha test) 

 

 

  • Normal map (optional):

 

RGB should contain normal map. 

Alpha (optional) should contain gloss map. 

If no texture assigned, we get a very good performance/memory saving/optimization 

 

 

  • Specular map (optional):

 

RGB should contain specular color. 

If no texture assigned, normal map alpha channel will be used as gloss map. 

If no texture assigned we get a good performance/memory saving/optimization. 

 

 

  • Opacity map (optinal):

 

RGB should contain opacity color used in backlighting. 

This texture can be much lower res than all others (eg: if diffuse is 1024x1024 this could be 128x128 or so). 

If no texture assigned we get a good performance/memory saving/optimization. 

 

Shader parameters:

Here you can Tune shader specific parameters. 

 

 

  • Back View dependecy

 

This is for changing the view dependecy of the back diffuse color. 

Makes it starting depending on the point of view earlyer or later. 

 

 

  • Back Diffuse Color

 

This is for the color of the backside of leaves. 

 

 

  • Back Diffuse Color Scale

 

This is for the color strength of the backside color of leaves. 

 

 

  • Detail Bending frequency

 

Difines the bending speed for complex (wind) bending 

Always make sure That this is in the right proportion to the wind in your level. 

 

 

  • Bending Edges amplitude

 

Difines the movement of red color in the in the complex bending setup 

 

 

  • Bending Branch amplitude

 

Difines the movement of blue color in the in the complex bending setup 

 

 

  • Back Shadow bias (only for SH)

 

This is controling the shadow power on the back difuse color 

 

Shader generation parameters:

Here you difine if you object is grass or leaves or should fit to Terrain. It s a different shading. 

 

 

  • Leaves:

 

This means that shader is only used for rendering leaves, it will use a much more complex shading (=expensive). 

Activate only for leaves rendering. 

 

 

  • Grass:

 

This means that shader is only used for rendering grass, it will use a much cheaper shading. 

Activate only for Grass rendering. 

It basicly kills spec and normal map setting, so the shading is only difuse. 

 

 

  • Fit to Terrain

This is for bigger grass patches only. it fits the object to the terrain surface.

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