If you’ve ever tired to get realistic renderings of leaves using procedural materials, you probably haven’t gotten very far. Using good textures based on photographs and scanned images is one of the best way to achieve the most realistic results. Since I live in the middle of western Pennsylvania, and I have about a million trees in my back yard, I decided to take a leaf off one of the many maple tree’s that are common to this area and use my scanner to scan in the leaf. After my leaf was scanned in, I created 3 texture maps to use for my rendering, a Color map, and Alpha map, and a Bump map. The Color Map is essentially the originally scanned image that we will be using for the color of the leaf. The second was the Alpha map, which was obtained by firing up my favorite image editor (Photoshop for my case, but Gimp will do the same), and masking off the leaf and filling the mask with white. Everything else was filled with black. The 3rd image was the Bump map, which was created simply by de-saturating a duplicate layer of the color map, and filling the rest in with black. Here are the resulting images used for this tutorial.

( Color Map, Alpha Map, Bump Map – click on images for larger view )

Now, lets get these images into Blender and create some really cool alpha mapped planes. First, and most obvious, setup your scene. This isn’t a beginner Blender tutorial, and I assume you know how to create planes. A simple scene as shown below will work.

Now, lets add a simple plane into the scene. I chose to subdivide mine a bit and use the proportional editing tool to make it curve a bit, so the leaf has more depth and unique shape. Now that you have your scene, lets set up the leaf texture.

Apply the 3 textures to your leaf object, each in their own texture channel. Use the settings below and apply them to your own scene.

( Leaf Texture and Material Settings)

Render and you should be finished. One thing to note however, I have had trouble with specularity issues when using AO. If anyone knows how to resolve this issue, I’d be glad to learn how.

Here’s my final rendering using the method I just mentioned: