Photometric stereo, for foliage
Turn real leaves into PBR textures.
Leafwork PBR turns a few photos of a real leaf into a game-ready material — normal, albedo, height, and opacity maps — using the same photometric-stereo technique studios use. No studio, no scanner: a phone and a flashlight.
4 light directions
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Normal -
Albedo -
Height -
Opacity
From a leaf to a material, in four steps
The pipeline is built for foliage, start to finish.
- 01
Photograph
Lay a leaf on a dark surface and take a few photos, each lit from a different direction. A phone camera and a handheld light are enough.
- 02
Solve
Leafwork reads how the light falls across the surface — photometric stereo — to recover the leaf's true shape and colour.
- 03
Get your maps
Out come four aligned maps — normal, albedo, height, and opacity — at up to 2048 px.
- 04
Drop it in
Export straight into Blender, Substance, Unreal, Unity, or SpeedTree, and light it however your scene needs.
Why capture your own?
A texture site gives you someone else's leaf. Leafwork gives you the one in your hand.
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Your own foliage
Capture the exact leaves your scene calls for — not a generic download a hundred other projects already used.
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No rig required
No scanner, no lightbox, no turntable. The whole capture setup fits on a desk.
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The real surface
Photometric stereo recovers genuine micro-detail — veins, ridges, translucency — not a normal map faked from one flat photo.
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Engine-ready
Blender and Substance presets are free; Unreal, Unity URP, SpeedTree, and Skyrim / Bethesda presets come with Pro.
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Yours to keep
A permanent free tier, not a trial. It runs on your own machine, and your photos never leave it.
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Cross-platform desktop
Native builds for Windows and Linux — installer, Flatpak, or AppImage.
The four maps you get
Every capture produces the same aligned set — the maps a modern PBR material is built from.
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Normal
Surface direction — the veins and ridges that catch light.
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Albedo
Base colour, with the lighting taken back out.
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Height
Relative depth, for displacement or parallax.
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Opacity
The leaf's silhouette, for clean cut-out edges.
Real maps, generated by Leafwork from the four oak-leaf photos above.
Free forever, Pro when you ship
The free tier is a complete tool, not a trial clock.
Free
forever- Outputs up to 2048 px
- All 8 pipeline stages, all 5 solvers
- PNG export
- Blender and Substance presets
- Hemisphere light-calibration widget
Pro
one-time purchase- Everything in Free
- Channel-packed exports (Unreal ORM, Unity MaskMap)
- Engine presets: Unreal, Unity URP, SpeedTree, Skyrim / Bethesda
- Batch CLI for many projects at once
- Advanced solver options
Pro pricing will be announced closer to release. See the full comparison →
Start with the free tier
Download Leafwork PBR and capture your first leaf. No account, no trial clock — the free tier is yours to keep.
Questions? support@leafwork.io