Black spots at trees... Any suggestions?

Hello folks,

I always get these black spots ://oi58.tinypic/14nfuz9.jpg at the trees, tried different kind of lightning, they don’t look like shadows to me.

Any ideas? =)

Have you already added a skylight + disabled “cast shadow” in the skylight? Because those black spots are the shadows from the leave planes :slight_smile:

Thanks for the fast reply, when I turn off the shadows 80% of the black spots are gone, but these are still there, ://oi61.tinypic/2gvpi86.jpg is it normal?

EDIT: here’s a second screenshot still shadows turned off, ://oi60.tinypic/2qxyi42.jpg the look really, really dark

Hmm ok, then the skylight isnt the problem. I dont have experience with speedtrees, but another thing could be that your normal map is wrong (e.g that you have to flip the green channel)

Awww, after you’ve mentioned it, I’ve decided to try with different tree from the pack and the problem was no longer there, so… it makes me feel good, that the problem is not in me. Thanks, I’ll write to about that.

I think you dont have to report it to , because many guys from are active in this forum and they have probably already seen this thread :wink:

Oh, too late, lol… didn’t know that. Well, if their commercial trees and things are fine, I’ll probably NOM NOM the store. Their other tree looks very good, ://oi58.tinypic/1564mjl.jpg soo… I hope they update their free pack on the website

Those non-shadowed Black Spots appear to be the mesh planes facing away from the light.

You should open the leaf material and set it to Subsurface Scattering and plug in a color into the SubSurface Color, and a float into the Opacity to control the strength.
That’ll let the light affect the backside of the mesh.

You are most likely just seeing lighting. The broadleaf’s leaf normal map is pretty drastic, so some leaves are lit from one way and others are lit from the other. If you rotate the light, you should see leaves on the front side predominantly lit and leaves on the backside predominantly dark, though there is some overlap.

Once you build lighting to get some ambient light in the mix, the tree should look much better. But maybe we can look into improving the lighting on that tree a bit.