week 3 - leaf and materials

This lesson we needed to add materials to an object to make it look more realistic, for this purpose, we decided to use a leaf. First we download an image of a leaf.

Then in photo shop we created a blacked out background version to use as a mask, to do this we used the magic want tool and a black background with an outer glow. This created a new image of a leaf

 Then after creating a plane for the leaf, I entered into the materials window and added the original leaf texture onto a ball. Then adding the black out image onto the "Opacity map" it hid the white background of the original image from sight so i was just left with the leaf. Then in order to increase the detail of the leaf, I then added the original image again to the "Bump map" and increasing its value to 130. This corses the material texture to take the detail of the leaf image.

 Finally after adding this to the plane, all that was needed was for the is for the plane to be shaped into a more realistic shape, after rendering the final produce looked like this.