Best blending method for tiling leafs?

capone

I've created leaf shapes (with the help of gradients) but when I mass tile them they are overlaying each other. The best blend so far is max lighten but because each leaf has gradients it's overlaying in certain areas. Is there any way to do this without any leafs looking transparent or like they are cutting into each other? I mean, if it was just these 2 leafs I'd just add one with 'copy' blend and use a mask but that's not really possible when it comes to having hundreds of these leafs?

Jerc

You will likely not be able to avoid overlapping. You could try laying your leaves using 2 or 3 different layers with less leaves on each layer to avoid overlaps as much as possible, but there is no perfect solution for this yet.

gnoop

I would rather just take a camera and go shot those leaves .  A plenty of them lay on the ground currently, in the northern hemisphere at least.     Photoscan or Reality Capture could give you the depth details up to each tiny veinlet in the leaves. ( no wind condition)   And they would always lay naturally.
The only problem Substance Designer takes forever to load sbs with bitmaps bigger than 512x512

poopipe

The colour versions of the tiling nodes support alpha