How to make the most out of your OPQ Plants

How to make the most out of your OPQ Plants

Thank you for purchasing plants from OPQ, I hope you enjoy them!

Here are some tips how to make them even more enjoyable. Some of those tips require some basic building/editing skills, others are easy enough that anybody can do.

1. First: some plant shapes need some special handling

• The plants that are tapered towards the bottom need to be sunk halfway into the ground.
• Some of the big plant groups have very noticeably symmetric plant patterns. These groups don't usually work well alone but break up the symmetry with two overlapping ones (with different sizes and rotations) or with some strategically positioned single plants and you get a tremendous number of plants with extremely low lag and land impact.

2. Reduce lag: Think layers!

OPQ plants are made for the lowest possible lag, significantly lower than plants from other brands. But to minimize the problem with lag, you need to think in layers - foreground, middle ground and background and nuances in between. Place the highly detailed plants where they can really shine and use less detailed low lag vegetation everywhere else. If you get this right, you can fill up your place with far denser and lusher vegetation than you usually see in SL and on opensim with no lag issues worth speaking of.

To help you select the best solution, we have categorized our plants in seven classes from Class A feature plants to Class G background vegetation screens. Normally we recommend Class A-B for selected special spots, Class C-E for the bulk of vegetation in areas where people are likely to walk around and Class E-G for pure background. But it's your choice of course.

3. Add variety!

If you bought one of our fatpacks or megapacks, you should have several slightly different shapes for the plant. That helps create variety but there are also a few simple tricks you can use:

• Rotate the plants. Don't let them all face exactly the same way. It's amazing how much this helps.
• Lower plants. Sink some of them slightly into the ground. Subtle but very simple and effective.
• Resize plants. If you know how to edit objects , you probably want to do it manually. If not, drag the included MBAGR resizer script onto the plant and click on it. (Remember to delete the script when you're done.

And if you are comfortable with the edit palette, in the texture tab there's a lot you can do:

• Tint plants. A tiny bit of gray shading to some of the plants can do wonders.
• Add glow. But don't overdo it! Even 0.02 can be too much. And don't add it to too many plants.
• Change the Mask cutoff. Or switch to Alpha blending. You may also try to add a teeny little bit of transparency (this only works with alpha blending). I think we need a special chapter about those alphas:

4. About alpha modes and such

Nearly all plants in SL and on opensim use "alpha textures", that is textures with transparent and semi-transparent parts. Unfortunately there is no 3D engine that can handle such textures really well so we have to compromise a little bit. The viewer has two different ways to handle transparent textures:

• Alpha blending: Each pixel in the texture can have one of 256 levels of transparency from 0 (fully opaque) to 255 (fully transparent).
• Advantages:
• Gives a smoother look
• Works well with any windlight settings
• Looks great at a distance
• But sadly, there are some serious drawback:
• Can be very laggy
• The alpha sorting bug: Overlapping blended surfaces can cause a horrendous mess.
• Alpha masking. Each pixel is either fully opaque or fully transparent. Since the pixels still have the 0-255 alpha value, you can use the Mask cutoff control to control which parts are transparent.
• Advantages:
• Hardly adds any lag at all
• No alpha sorting bug
• You can often adjust the density of the plant with the Mask cutoff control
• Disadvantages
• Can look rather blocky at a distance
• Doesn't work well with very hard windlight settings (such as the morning and afternoon parts of the default day cycle).

Nearly all OPQ plants use alpha masking by default. With the vegetation density they are made for, blending simply isn't an option. But there is no right or wrong here, feel free to change it if you like.