Alpha Leaves

After speaking to my tutor he told me I should use alpha maps to add the leaves to my tree. This is a new technique to me so I did some research into it and watched tutorials. After figuring out what I had to do I started by finding a png image of willow tree leaves.

 

I then brought it into Photoshop to remove the background, make it transparent and create a black and white version of the image.

 

Next I created a 2D plane in Maya and applied the image as its texture, thereby making the plane transparent and only showing the leaves. The final step was to duplicate the plane lots and structure them around the small branches. I am very happy with my tree now although I may add more leaves at some point if needs be.