I took a quick play with some leaves the other day - they _are_ tricky, aren't
they?

I came to the conclusion that there is very little light passing through the
leaf onto the area (leaves) below, and that radiosity/light domes/ambient
occlusion gives you almost all the lighting you see. I think the other two
factors that give the crown of tree a lighter appearance is that the underside
of leaves is often light that the top, and that newer leaves are often lighter
too. Someone needs to write a paper with actual light measurements though I
suppose.

I might do some more playing with the leaves - these aren't translucent, but I
think I know how I could do that.

The texture is scanned from a leaf in my yard, and there's also a bump map, but
the lighting setup doesn't really show it up.

I made the leaf object by tracing the outline of the scanned image, then
outputting a (very thin) prism, then applying the leaf surfaces (top and bottom
image maps, bump map etc).

Cheers,
Edouard.

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