How do I ..... make a "3D" image look good? (like trees)

I tried to check for tree building because the build must be almost similar but since "money tree" is referenced so often I kinda got stuck by all those unwanted posts.

What I want to do is to have a few prims thrown together with an image of my avatar that looks kinda OK from all possible angles. I looked at trees a bit and found that one has to use more than 2 planes intersecting in the middle to get a decent looking effect.

Is there a general rule about how many planes at which angles to use to get decent looks, tips on texture flipping, etc?

What I'd really want is an all around view of my avatar (front, sides, back) but I don't think that this will work. If anyone has experimented a bit with that I'd like to get some feedback. If this is indeed impossible I'll do for a decent frontal shot that should look nice from all angles viewed - which brings us back to: How many planes, which angles?

Any recommendations?

I'd probably go with 2 perpendicular planes, one for front & back, and one for right & left profiles.

If you want to get fancy, you could add another two additional planes, giving you one every 45 degrees, but that would require twice the photography. You'd need 8 shots of your av instead of just four. The extra images would add more fluidity to the effect, as the viewpoint would transition from front to 3/4 to side instead of straight from front to side.

I don't know if the extra shots would be worth the effort though. Those 3/4 views might not really be necessary. If it were me, as I said, I'd probably just go with front, back, side, side.

will your avitar be standing or sitting? how will the arms be?

ive seen them with many many planes, as a optical illusion the AV was posed at the correct angles so as you walked around it the av looked 3d

if your not going that far 2 planes aught to be fine, visually they have a range of 180 degrees so you can see them right up to the sides of the prim (not counting random joe's funky camera angle, course you would use the second plane to counter that)

I am not an artist, but I would have thought that more than two planes would bring in an obscuring effect where you need to look through a plane to see another. With trees and their branches that is exactly the kind of look you want but not so sure about av look alikes.

Would it not be better to build a human robot? One elongated globe for the head, another for the torso, and a couple each for arms and legs. Then you could texture that with piccies of yourself. When mono comes in you'll be able to animate your puppet in real time and make it look like a real av!

I think Dirty McLean has some robots for sale like that.

Just a thought.

Carol, if computer graphics behaved like the real world, you'd be absolutely right, of course. However, it doesn't. So you know, the 'intersecting planes' method of building takes advantage of a glitch in OpenGL which causes textures with alpha channels (transparency) to render improperly when they overlap in close proximity (commonly referred to as "the alpha sorting glitch". The renderer will not draw all the planes at the same time, just whichever one is closest or most perpendicular to the camera at the moment.

If you examine closely how trees are commonly built in SL, you'll see that there's none of the obscuring effect you're describing. You don't look through branches in front to see branches further back. All you really see is one texture one one plane, a picture of a tree. The whole tree object is made of intersecting planes that share a common center point. As your point of view changes, which plane you can see changes correspondingly. Those that are at oblique angles to the camera disappear as the one that's most perpendicular comes into view.

This same alpha sorting phenomenon causes lots of problems for 3D artists (both in and out of SL) but it does come in handy for the type of work we've been discussing here. To build a "robot" like you described would take hundreds of prims, if not thousands, to build well (the avatar model is several thousand polygons). By taking advantage of the alpha sorting glitch, a suitable mockup can be built with just a small handfull of well textured, well placed planes.

Hihi,

thanks for the input. What I need it for is a kind of 3D poster to put in a holo vendor to advertise attachments. In most vending places I do not have enough room to set up a holorezzer for my "furniture" and another, image based, vendor, for the attachments.
Since the attachments themselves look a tad boring at times I want a 3D figure of my avi wearing it which will give a much better impressions than the attachment without avatar or a plain 2D image.