Alpha Cut

Short Description

Creates mesh cards using opacity textures.

Description

This tool creates mesh cards from an opaque texture, converting black and white pixel information into geometrical shapes. It is primarily used for generating meshes that can be manipulated and positioned within a 3D scene.

Properties

Base Properties

• Texture: Provide an image (PNG, JPG) to create your alpha card/meshes from. This image should contain black and white pixels, where white pixels represent areas you want to convert into geometry.

• Material: Material to assign to the generated meshes.

• Face To: Your meshes can face up, making them laid flat in your scene, or front, making them look upfront.

• Pivot Position: Sets the pivot position to the center or bottom. Centered pivots are useful if for example you want to scatter leaves on a ground, while bottom is used for placing leaves on stems/branches.

• Border Density: Controls the vertex density around the borders of each mesh.

• Pivot Offset: Offsets the pivot upwards or downwards.

• Scale: Controls the overall size of your generated meshes.

• Position Override: Moves the generated meshes to this position.

• Min Res: Controls the minimum vertex density based on the scale of individual meshes.

• Max Res: Controls the maximum vertex density based on the scale of individual meshes.

• Border Resample: Preserves shape tries to keep the shape of each pixel island at the cost of more polygons, while reduce count gives you a better polygon count control method over your generated meshes, at the cost of cutting your pixel islands off in some areas.

• Border Padding: Offsets the generated meshes along the edges of each pixel island in your opacity map. This can be useful to control mesh clipping when some pixel islands overlap with each other.

• Ignore Ratio: Removes meshes with a size ratio below this value. For example, 0.1 will remove meshes that are 10% smaller than the average size of all meshes.

• DEV ONLY - Ignore Method: Specifies the method for ignoring dimensions in development mode.

• Flip Normals: If set to true, flips the normals of the generated meshes.

• Pack To Center: If checked, all generated meshes get packed to the center, otherwise they use their position in your input alpha.

Noise

• Intensity: Controls the intensity of the noise.

• Frequency: Noise frequency that's applied on the meshes.

• Max: Maximum noise value.

• Min: Minimum noise value.

Tag Settings

• Create Tag: If set to true, a tag containing the generated meshes will be created, and accessible in the Scene Tags.

• Tag Name: Stores the created meshes under this tag.