Trees

#1 Yes, it is transparent images.
No, I dont know where a tutorial is.
I've tried and failed :)

#2 Best way to make trees while still keeping good performance is make the trunk and branches in 3d, get them as low poly as possible, while still keepin em lookin nice. Then for the leaves, use alpha'd sprites. Not one per leaf or anything, but anywhere where your branches are straight you can get away with one big sprite with lotsa leaves on, then mebbe rotate it 90 or 45 degrees till it looks nice n covered. The way I've always done it for other engines, not sure how well it would translate to torque, there may be a more efficient way...

#3 can you explain this a bit more...

alpha's??

one bit sprite on what?? on that straigt part??

hope to learn more...

#4 By alpha'd I mean sprites with an alpha channel, so that you can select the areas to be transparent. That way you can have an image with lots of leaves on (eg) a black background, and use an alpha channel to make it so only the leaves are visible.

As for the thing about one big sprite...I mean that instead of using one sprite for every leaf (lots along the length of a branch), you can use a larger sprite (as long as the branch will allow), with lots of leaves painted on it, then duplicate it around the branch to fill it out a bit. This keeps the facecount down by a lot.

Some people like to use one really big sprite that covers the entire canopy of the tree, and then rotate this several times, which is good if the tree won't be seen too close, but if it will then I prefer the method above.

Its a hard thing to explain, but I hope I've done a slightly better job this time...

#5 theres one thing that I, myself dont really understand. How do you make an alpha layer. Say I have some leaves with a white background and I want the white parts to be transparent. Would I make a saparate image completelly white?

#6 an alpha layer is not a seperate image (in most cases) its embedded in the main image. Image formats such as tiff, tga, etc have them. In photoshop, the aplha channel is in the "channels" tab, and you just colour anything you want to be opaque as white, and anything transparent as black (so colouring the leaves white and the areas around them black). Then just save, making sure the aplha channel gets saved too.

Hope that helps a bit...any image editor supporting the formats using alpha channels should also be able to create an save them.

#7 If you need more help, a good place to go is www.cgchat.com for questions (in the 3d realtime artistry section) if you sign up, my name is Loveless, the referal credit would be appreciated :)