Making Seam Layers

Before we apply our maps we need to save them out from photoshop but before we do so were going to create a simple seam image in order to make sure all the edges blend together properly because even dough we baked a seamless color for the base that doesn't mean that all layers will blend together seamlessly, the way you create a seam image is to first get a selection of the leaf by ctrl+clicking on any base layer, create a new layer on top of the base layer on the current set and rename it edge blend, expand the selection for about 15 pixels use the paint bucket tool in order to fill the new selection in the new layer with about the same color that that specific map already has on the edges, contract the selection by twice the amount you expanded it earlier, in this case its 30 pixels, delete the selection and apply a Gaussian blur of about 20 and make a duplicate of the layer and merge it down to make it more apparent, last what we will do is create a new layer at the bottom of all the layers in the set and rename it to background, simply fill this layer with the same color you used for the edge blend layer. After you do this for one set what you can do is duplicate the edge blend layer, move it to another set and adjust its color values in the hue/saturation in order to change the colors to better fit the color already on the edges and then make a background color for that specific layer. After your finished making your seam images just hide all the sets and unhide each set one by one while saving a .jpg copy of that current set using proper names. Here are two examples of a map with a seam layer and a background layer created for it in order to ensure that all of our textures blend perfectly with our final images.

Before we start working on the following sections, I want to say that were going to start using max again, the sections will be allot shorter because I wont go as much into theory as I did in the past sections, I'm going to keep the max sections short and simple, by now you should already know what each specific map does and what effect it has on the leaf there is no need to explain things twice. Even though the following sections are max specific I'm pretty sure you can do the same in other high end 3d applications, I personally haven't used most of the other high end 3d packages but they most likely do have map able translucency attributes, blend or multi-layer shaders with blend together according to the information in a texture map, falloffs or map able gradients that are influenced by light and shadow, fresnel reflections and the ability to reflect environment maps, and self-illumination and luminosity attributes or other attributes that have the same or a close effect as them.