Custom Leaf photo/UV map tutorial.

[Patrick210]

In the screenshot you can see the different choices for the ways that leaves are arranged on the branch. It really depends on the leaf or leaf group itself and the look you're going for. It's very quick & easy to just try each one and see what works for your particular situation. This ability is an advantage over Vue plants because they are only flat planes of leaves on the branches and don't work well at even semi- close distance in my opinion.

[Couerl]

Outstanding work and shows a true command of the software. I had always thought in the back of my mind there must be a solution to have the plant editor in Carrara do more than just trees and this shows it is possible and not only possible, pretty simple too.

Excellent! Now to solve bushes and shrubs and vines and stuff.

You da man.

[Rowan]

Ok, the mac version is complicated. The Carrara icon is a package, and we need to get inside. So, save your leaf to an outside location eg the Desktop or a folder for temp items. Make sure you know where though, as you'll need it. Now, go to the Carrara icon. Right click (ctrl + click for those with 1 button mice) on it and select 'Show Package Contents'. This should open up a window with Carrara as the header and one item, a folder called 'Contents'. Open this folder. For some reason, opening a package set the window view to folder icons, personally, I'd change it to list, as that allows you to see your path. Open the folder, and you should see 3 items, you want 'MacOS'. Open the file again, then open 'Data', and there's the plants folder. The actual leaf itself I think needs to go into the 'Leaves' folder, although I'm not sure. Best way is to hold 'alt' whilst dragging the leaf to the file. That way it only makes a copy, and the original stays where it was. Terminal savvy users can probably do all this in one command line. But I'll leave that to them.

[Xavier1420]

Sweet tutorial!
Thank you for taking the time Pat!
Here's a screen capture of the above MacHD/Applications/Carrara5/Contents/MacOS/Data/Plants/
Info, for those of you who are visual like me...
Plus, I just found out that you have to QUIT out of the App to get the list to include your new model in the Plants List, otherwise it doesn't show up and kinda crashed Carrara on me.



Mike R.

[Nester751]

Thank you Patrick!

[franklin]

Originally Posted by Patrick210

Select the “polygon” tool which is the bottom icon under the
“sphere” icon list, far left in the top row of icons. In the “right” view
section, trace around the outside edge of the leaf. The screenshot shows the "left" view, change it to the 'right" view or your map will be reversed. Add a couple of
points to create a small stem at the top of the leaf. Press enter
when you have finished.

I can't figure out how to change the left view to the right view. My screen looks just like yours with the left view.
This is a good tutorial especially with the large pictures of the screen that I can actually read the settings.
I saw some other tutorial where they put a cut out leaf on a black background before they took it into Carrara. What would be the reason for them doing that?