Use a cylinder with a row of trees and sky as environment for a landscape animation. Now I only want to use the row of trees and cut off the sky in the cylinder. So a cylinder with an irregular tree border. How do I do that?
Edit the image in an image editor and replace the sky with transparent pixels. Save the image as a .png.
Dave’s solution is the easiest and most efficient, there are a couple ways to do it directly on sketchup though, the obvious one is show hidden geometry and with the pencil tool trace manually the contours, another easier way to do that is using Fredo’s plugin tools on surface that will make tracing the border a lot easier than with the native tools and the last option that comes to my mind is using also a fredo’s plugin that he released few time ago called pic 2 shape, it doesn’t work well with all the images, you can give it a try anyways. [Plugin] Pic2Shape - Extracting contours from images
If I only use the trees for the cylinder I assume it is still a flat cylinder that does not follow the contours of the trees. And that is precisely the intention because I want to do the trees with cast/receive shadows ON and with air it is now OFF.
You didn’t specify that in your original post.
You’ll then need to trace the border between the trees in one way or another so to separate the sky region and delete it. Keep in mind it will create a great deal of added geometry which may have an impact on performance. I think you’ll find you have strange shadows from the tree line, too. Your call.
Then without shadow. The point is that I see a background with forest in every camera position. With 5D Render I do the rest like the sky. That has to happen above the forest edge. Diameter of ground surface is 200m.
Found a curved forest edge in 3D warehouse with which I can make a 360 degree forest edge. However, I have to do that in 5 parts and cut off the component on the right side so that it connects to the next. What is the best way to do that?
you could also just use a single forest photo as a watermark in your style.
place it in the background, no matter where you point cour camera, you’ll see it.
