[Radiance-general] Trees... and defining them in radiance

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi list,

this is somehow a technical question, as I wonder how to define trees for a 
urbanism model efficiently in radiance.

In CAD, I use a simple mesh and give it a material with "holes", so that I 
get a somehow broken surface.

In radiance, I can define a tree looking like this by defining a geometry 
(e.g. made of a hundred of surfaces) and let radiance render this. Or I use 
the same way as in CAD, take a quite simple geometry and create the hole by 
mapping with colorpict onto a quite simple transparent surface. In fact, I 
don't have much experience with textures and patterns in radiance ("Rendering 
with Radiance" is next to my keyboard, I wouldn't know what to do here 
without this ;-).

What do you think that I should prefer? I ask as I need to know which way is 
more efficient as I have got a very large model to place my treed in, and I 
want to be still able to let radiance compute on my machine in reasonable 
times.

In any way, I am using instances here.

Thank You, CU, Lars.