CAD Ltd

Adding trees, people and cars to rendering projects

Simple trees on a Plane

Greenery is the biggest grey area on most people rendering projects, and most often the best
solutions come from situations where the designer has looked beyond the leaves and
branches problem. One good method to show the volume and transparency of trees is to
make simple 3d wire frames, without worrying about the reality. Whatever you make, it will
always be a virtual world.

There is however one great way of getting trees or cars or people into your scenes - using
non-repeating / transparent texture maps. Here's how to go about it:

1: Get your images. There are some already in the standard texture maps in Allplan
(C:\Nem/Allplan/Std/Design). They are those pictures of cars and people and trees that have
large areas of black. Otherwise, scan in images, remembering to cut them out in a photo-
manipulation program such as Photoshop, so they sit on a black background.

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2: make the props. To get these people and trees into your model, you are going to make a
plane to stick them on, like posters. You don't have to worry about the shape, a rectangle will
do, though it's important that the rectangle is more or less the height and width of the tree or
people you are going to paste onto it. Also, you're going to have to be sparing with assigning
colours!

Another way of making the plane is to create a wall that has a height of the tif image and then
draw the wall length the width of the tif. Make sure you set the wall thickness to something
like 1mm.

Please note that if you draw the wall in the color cyan and apply the surface ..texture (tree.tif
image) (by right clicking on the plane in the animation window and editting the ‘surface
properties) to it then anything drawn in that colour will also have the surface …texture (tree.tif
image).

For another way of doing this that doesn’t change with the colour of line see below Setting
surface as a ‘Custom surface’

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3: Now, in the texture toolbar, apply the texture you want. Then change three values:

The colour should be set to white.

The mapping type should be set to transparent

The map insertion should be non-metric (it will stretch to the form you apply it to).

The map should be non-repeating.

Now view the image in the animation window, or render!

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When rendering! note that if light and shadows are used the shadows are represented
correctly relative to the outline of the trees. Below is a rendered image of some figures set up
in the same way with a floor and background.

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Setting surface as a ‘Custom surface’

The advantage of a ‘Custom Surface’ is that it is assigned to actual

objects and has no link relative to a colour used in the 2D window.

The only draw back may be that you do not have a ‘suface’ to apply to the object in the first
place. This is no problem as it is very easy to create the surface file needed from any
graphics image (tif, jpg, bmp etc) . as part of the process of applying the surface.

If you apply a ‘custom surface’ in the 2D window to an object. Then only that object will have
the tree.tif applied. To do this right mouse on the plane/wall in the 2D plan view and select

You need to generate a ‘Surface’ file for this to work. You can do this from the tree.tif
(C:\Nem\Allplan\Std\Design\Laubbaum.tif) file that you already have by

1. opening it as a texture
2. Clicking the ‘Save’ button to save is as a SFS Surface file

Then you can select it as a ‘Surface’

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More advanced method of showing a tree on a surface.

One of the problems with the simple method is that we can still see the edges
of the plane that we have used when it is in front of other 3D objects.

A way around the problem is to;

1. Insert the tif image (Insert > Get from Library > Bitmap Image)
2. Trace around the edges of the image using a slab
3. Convert it into being a 3D element
4. Rotate the object up through 90 degrees.
5. Apply the image as a surface as described above.

This will give us a plane that is the shape of the tree outline with the tree
image on it. There are therefore no corners on the object now and will
therefore not show on any other 3D objects.

1. Insert the tif image (Insert > Get from Library > Bitmap Element)

Make sure that the transparency is set on

The size of the image is set by the size of the graphics file so just leave it
alone (unless you want a distorted image that is)

See the settings below;

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2. Trace around the edges of the image using a slab

Use the standard ‘Slab’ command in the Architecture > Walls,
components, openings. This allows you to draw a polygon all the way
around the outside of the tree…this is why we use the Slab command as
the Wall command does not allow us to do this (Don’t forget to set the slab
height to 1mm to give us a relatively flat plane).

3. Convert it into being a 3D element

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4. Rotate the object up through 90 degrees.

Using the 3D modelling tools rotate the ‘plane’ up by 90 degrees. (Bonus
tools > 3D Modelling)

Use the base of the tree as the rotation axis and rotate it up by 90
degrees.

5. Apply the image as a custom surface as described above.

When viewed in the 3D animation window the tree now appears on a

plane the shape of the tree. This is fine until we rotate the view and notice
that we can view the tree along its edge. To get round this problem we
could just do a few rotated copies of the tree plane about the vertical axis
of the tree trunk this would give us a series of planes that gives us an
image in most views.

If we want a totally 3D tree we would have to define each leaf, branch,

trunk etc as 3D objects which would ultimately take up a lot of memory in
the project.

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