Boni posted at 5:05PM Tue, 19 July 2016 - #4276408

"... Another suggestion. Starting with the farthest "layer" of the scene, use whatever camera view is final view and render ... NO background and save as .png, do this with each forward layer until you get the closest. bringing in ONLY the items for each layer per render. Next Place ONE sided low-poly squares on each layer's position and texture them with each render making them each "billboards". Keep the final closest render 3d. We do trees like this all the time ... it has a good chance of working. Haven't tried it, but this is my theory and suggestion. This way you will get true shadows from each layer ... if you light it properly. That will be the tricky part.

Boni, thanks for that suggestion about the low poly squares. I'd used boxes for that, but never the low poly squares. Maybe they'll look better than my renders on the boxes.