Hi I am tying to build a scene and I need plants/trees/shrubs etc. Ive downloaded some from 3d-plants.com which are great for backgrounds but a)they don't hold textures/ bumps very well, the are 3ds imports. and b) they are not very detailed. What I need are some leaves to place in the forground close to the camera so they need to be fairly well detailed any ideas thanks Dave

enlarge your 3ds import file,rotate it flat, export as an obj, open in uv mapper, assign the leaf to a new material, planar map the leaf to its own template, save the object. Then make a large bitmap image (like 2000 x 2000 or so) and either take a picture of a real leaf or find one on the internet. Paste the leaf into your template, shrink the file down to about 700 x 700, save, and apply it as a texture to your leaves. Take the same picture, desaturate it, increase the contrast, and use it as your bump. You can just use simple object color for your stems, just apply a bump map with a lot of noise for texture. If your bump map is god, you shouldnt need a tremendous amount of detail.

I put a posable leaf figure in free stuff. It's has a low poly count so you can put in alot of them.

another shot of it, It's nothing fancy but it works pretty well. you'll notice that one leaf has coloring problem (?) and some of the leaves have minor joint problems, but that shouldn't matter to much.

your coloring problem looks like either some vertices need to be welded or they arent lined up right. Just a thought.