Cousin Ricky <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
>
> TL;DR: I'm now working on very low detail mesh trees.

> I found the black borders on the smooth triangles unexpectedly
> disturbing... Disappointingly, double
> illumination had its own peculiarities near the shadow lines.
>
> Tradeoffs.  I'm looking to skip the double illumination and tolerate the
> black borders.
>

IMO, the trees with double_illuminate ON look (tolerably) better than with it
off.  The trees appear to blend in better with your background sky pigment. From
a practical viewpoint, I think the non-smooth 'appearance' of the outside tree
borders (the straight triangle edges) would be more noticable to someone's eyes
than the double_illumination artifacts. Ditto the triangle edges within the body
of the tree. Since the trees are *designed* to be very low-memory-intensive (and
will not the 'central focus' of any render that you use them in), they look
quite decent. (Although, I would suggest upping the triangle count just a
little, to make them a bit smoother overall-- which, I admit, might erase the
nice 'angular' effect of the outside tree edges!)

Another *possible* way around the problem would be to use an interior texture as
well-- maybe with the color of the sky (or the tree itself?), and a high ambient
or emission value for its finish. Then those edge normals might 'pick up' that
interior color rather than, say, black. Just a theory.

And a gentle reminder: #declaring the tree meshes themselves beforehand will
allow almost unlimited copies with very little memory increase.

As for the double_illuminate artifacts at the edges of the trees: Does the
width/size of those rendered artifacts diminish if the trees are placed far into
the distance? Or does the width remain constant (i.e., possibly becoming as
large as an entire distant tree?) In other words, are the artifacts independent
of camera-tree distance? I don't think I've ever tried such an experiment to
see.

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