Creating flora with Opacity mapping and a level of detail version

This week I have been working on a model of a banana plant. It is also the first time that I have used Opacity Mapping. 

Here is the texture I used for the model

I copied the texture into a new Photoshop document and coloured all the solid areas in white (RGB 255,255,255) and the transparent areas in black (RGB 0,0,0). 

In the 3ds Max texture editor I added an Opacity map and selected my alpha map image. 

Here is how the Opacity map and texture appears on the leaves

This is how the full model looks

To make the low poly Level of Detail version I rendered the model with the Front and Left viewports (saving each one as a PNG file). I then loaded the images into Photoshop and created 2D textures by resizing them to fit 512x512 pixels. 

To create the Alpha maps textures, all I needed to do was Duplicate the layer from each texture into a new document, added a black background layer (RGB 0,0,0) and then selected the pixels for the tree using the control key and mouse clicking on the layer icon and filled them in white (RGB 255,255,255) by pressing ctrl + delete. 

The low poly tree consists of 2 planes, rotated 90 degrees and a third plane for the bananas

Banana Musa (click to view in 3D) 

Banana Musa LOD (click to view in 3D)