About Leafwork
Real materials, from real foliage.
Leafwork PBR turns photographs of real leaves into PBR texture sets. It exists because good foliage is everywhere — and the tools to capture it shouldn't need a lab.
Why Leafwork exists
Most 3D foliage comes from a handful of texture libraries. It's good work — but it means the same few leaves turn up across thousands of scenes, and none of them are the plant you're actually trying to depict.
Photometric stereo — photographing a surface under several light directions and reconstructing it from how the light falls — has been the studio-grade way to capture real materials for years. It usually means a rig: a dome of lights, a copy stand, calibrated cameras.
Leafwork's aim is to take that technique out of the lab. Lay a leaf on a dark surface, light it from a few directions with a handheld torch, take the photos, and let the app reconstruct the rest. The setup below — a camera, a light, and a steel ball for reference — is the whole rig.
How photometric stereo works
The same leaf, photographed under different light directions — that's all the input the reconstruction needs.
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Lit from top -
Lit from bottom -
Lit from left -
Lit from right
Where the surface tilts toward a light it brightens; where it tilts away, it darkens. Compare those brightness changes pixel by pixel and you can work out which way the surface faces at every point — its normal.
From that field of normals, Leafwork integrates a height map, separates the leaf's true colour (albedo) from the shading it was photographed under, and traces the leaf's outline for an opacity mask. The reflective ball in the capture tells the app where each light actually sat, so the result stays honest to the real lighting.
An independent project
Leafwork is built by one developer, in the open, shaped by what hobbyist 3D artists actually need. There's no marketing team behind it — which is why the core tool ships with a permanent free tier and the honest development status you'll find on the product pages.
Questions, feedback, or a leaf you'd like to see captured? Reach the project at support@leafwork.io or on GitHub.
Try it on your own leaves
The free tier is permanent. Download Leafwork PBR and capture your first material.