hey! I need some help with this image for the monthly challenge. The floor texture is from animax.it obviously, and the leaf is from turbosquid, placed in the symmetrical lattice, given a .01 depth, and then given the very same texture. bump map created from the same texture, b&w. what else? I don't specifically like it because it seems to be lacking some degree of realism. I'm not sure what. The lighting is from the sun, because whenever I put lights on top of objects that are very thin, I get pink dots all over them (?). Anyway, I would have liked it to be curved, but since I couldn't export the obp anywhere to screw with it, I'm left with this. the original plan was for a yard with a yellowing tree, and the pov of a porch, with that very leaf being blown inside by the wind. all comments and criticisms open. drac

Oh...have I tried this before. Wood is easy, trying to make a curved leaf (out of a terrain) is v e r y difficult. I've seen leaf images applied to flattened spheres that came out fairly okay, but I think you want what I want which is to use the terrain not a curved yet flat surface for the texture. Really, you can only do it by what you mentioned; exporting the mesh and deforming it with some other program, or actually making a terrain that looks like a leaf AND is curved. I still have yet to make a truly decent leaf that way. But, I'm convincing myself it can be done, well. Wood, use the biggest freaking texture you can get your hands on. Don't get the camera too close to it, a little distance will help as will showing it at an angle, I like it around x=45, y=30, z=0. This will show the thickness of the "wood" and help sell it as more realistic. Did you make a terrain out of the wood texture?

Here's what I'm getting at, with the wood.

How about instead of using a lattice use a terrain then you won't have to woory about thickness. Then apply gaussian in the terrain editor to give it a curve. Then if you need the edges raised more you can clip the terrain, go back to wireframe, stretch it(only the unclipped part with be edited), go back to terrain editor and unclip. It's not perfect but you might get close to what you are after.

Attached Link: http://www.pennypacker.net/Resources/two_leaves.jpg

If you take your lattice, put the pic in the first window, and put a simple gradient in the second window, you can make the leaf bend. The link is an example of this, and you can exaggerate that bend a bit if you tweak it. At the link is a leaf I did last year from a scanned leaf. I used several lattices to get it where I wanted it though. I've also seen people export lattices to Poser, apply a magnet and export back to Bryce again.

I think some DOF might help for realism