Often time I noticed guys creating a tree but the leaf doesnt look natural. So I thought of writing a tutorial, which will help you to make a realistic tree. 

Here is a picture I've downloaded from the net, If you see it carefully, you will notice that the tip of the leaves are not fully green but a mixture of orange + green. And the reason is, they are lit by the direct light, but the leaves inside are green and dark, because they are lit by the indirect light.SO how do we create the same effect in Maya? Well.. we can create a shader for it and put one light and we are done. Trust me it is very simple.
Ok, Here I made a tree with thousands of leaf on it, 

My Leaf texture

Now Create a Lambert Shader connect leaf texture in color and Alpha of leaf in Transparency channel. 

Then Create a surfaceLuminance node (in the hypershade window Color utilities > surfaceLuminance) and blendColors node (in the hypershade window color utilities > blendColors).

Connect surfaceLuminance1 outValue to blendColors1 blender channel.

Here is my value for blendColors1

Now connect the blendColors output to leaf texture file Color Gain

And add a light in your scene and render it. Isnt it cool ?
This is my render.


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