Making Leaves Using Mapping Techniques

This leaf was created using mapping techniques. A mask was made in photoshop from the shape of the leaf image. The original leaf image was applied to the plane in 3ds max and used as a bump map and the mask was applied to make the outside of the leaf transparent.

The plane was shaped to make it more leaf shaped using an Edit poly modifier and using soft selection to select the vertices to rotate parts of the leaf.

Final rendered leaf