Smoothing Groups -Soft or Hard Normals On Alpha Cards used for Tree Canopies in game

synergy11

What is best practice for getting good real time rendering of tree canopies in game? Should I soften all edges in Maya before exporting or keep the Alpha Planes all hard edges?

Most of these planes are 4 - 6 poly So I get a bit of bend on the branches.

What's common practice?


Thanks a lot!

alecchalmers

Have you tried the method where you encompass your foliage in a half sphere and transfer attributes>>vertex normals? This usually works great for me.

About halfway down, callebo explains it well.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=125920

synergy11

I've tried this method. But it is still lighting incorrectly on some of the alpha cards. This post has pictures.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=150591

The only thing I did not try was duplicating the faces then welding the verts. As that would significantly increase the density of my foliage canopies.