Creating a 2D plane tree from a 3D model

SGTGunner

Greetings All,

Does anyone know of a good tutorial to take a 3d model and project it to a 2D plane model? I have some high detailed trees that I want to have as low LOD 2D trees.

Thanks in Advance.

Cheers,

-SGTGunner

Goat Justice

Any reason you couldn't just render them in Max or Maya? If all you want is a plane with a billboard of the tree on it that should do I'd think.

SGTGunner

Humm, thanks for the reply. So, do I just need to set up the camera from different perspectives (left, right, front, etc.) and then render? With the output, do I just mask off around it and then apply to a plane/s?

Lamont

Here is an example when I had to do this work.

• Create a null in the center of the world. Parent the camera to this.
• Object is in the center of the world.
• Camera is set to target.
• Target is at mid center of object.
• Set your frames from 0-359.
• set rotation of null to 0,0,0 on frame 0. (assuming x,y,z)
• Set rotation of null to 0,359,0 on frame 359.
• Then render.

This will give you one angle. For each additional angle, set up another camera.

If this results in too many images, reduce the frames, but make sure to divide the degrees per frame according. My example as 1:1.

SGTGunner

Thanks Lamont. This forum is the best for super help and quick too. I appreciated everyone's advice here. So, after I render, I most likely need to go into Photoshop and then make around the tree transparent or is there an option to set at render?

Lamont

Depends on the engine. But you can use TGA since it embeds alpha if you choose 32 bit.

Noors

yeah render on tga with premultiplied alpha OFF or you'll get a dark fringe.
Probably a good idea to also use solidify or dilation filter in photoshop (that goes with xnormal install)