Billboarding pine

I tried out the billboarding technique every current rpg game uses... gothic III, TES IV and so on...
i dunno...
Pro:

A way lower polycount: 245 Polys for this one

contra:

the lightning is bad
looks a lil bit odd

what do you say?

btw:
i did the textures myself with my digicam

I'd have to say that looks pretty brilliant :)

What lighting system did you use? WC3s or somesuch?

Billboarding is what made all Oblivion terrain beautiful--but they had to do the lighting different and IMO did it well. WC3 style lighting, as a weaker engine, seems to ignore billboarding completely when it comes to lighting--the billboard turns light and dark as you'd flip the camera view, where it should just have a uniform light.

Maybe you could try making an ambient light inside and around the foliage? Probably lame way around though.

Mhm i'd love to change the ambient lighting of wc3, too.
I wonder whether there's a way to (but i dont think so).
Placing lightsources around the foliage is a pretty bad idea since those light sources would affect the foliage by night too and that would look as if theres something glowing in the trees...
Otherwise i'd have to animate those things... and i don't like to.

Btw:
My girlfriend wanted me to add some pink blossoms and so i did ^^
Taste the new homoerotic flower tree:




xD

I like all the green things. :)

Yeah, I was aware of that issue (ambient lighting at night). I wonder if a triggered lighting system for picking all the trees and putting a glow model of sorts around if in the morning would work....

Anyhow, nice pink blossoms--they further the pwnage of this model. I should think that these trees will look fine if only viewed helicopter style in WC3. Am I wrong?

Honestly, if you did that with your own digicam, you did a hell of a job. +rep (if it lets me lol)

Nice, but too dark in my opinion, it needs more contrast. That or some lighting maps and stuff.

I thought wc3's ambient light was uniform from all directions. Ingame, units don't appear to have particular shaded and lighted areas, they just appear uniformaly bright except for where the texture itself is shaded. Maybe I just didn't look close enough; besides, even if it is uniform in melee wc3 it would still suck if you tried to make an advanced lighting environment for a cinematic or something, and your trees suddenly started behaving oddly.

new variation

sexcellent. 'nuff said.

Wow.. I love these.. +REP

Can I have em?

They will be a part of my real texture expansion pack.