Yep, Bazze is a good and generous guy, and a hell of a modeler!

It was genius then, and it's genius now, and as useful a time-saver as it's ever been! I used to use your idea a lot for compositing with Bryce renders. Thank you for reminding me that this good old trick can work with other apps. :)

Thanks for the illustrations and information from your "particle experiments" Paul.  Even if you didn't get exactly the effect you were shooting for, I'll bet you learned something useful in the process of all that work, lol.

*Mark B.- I also would love to see a particle sprites tutorial, either here, or as part of your VTC Carrara tutorial series. We're not trying to squeeze you to death here.;-0

*Quote- "Or you could just save and distribute the settings so people can generate their own."

While it is true that distributing the settings for trees would be a lot more efficient use of bandwidth, I would also have to say that many people who use freebies would not be the sort 
who like to model, or deal with the complexities of a modeler, tree or otherwise. It kind of defeats the purpose.

The only problem I can see is that some of the Arbaro generated trees and plants can be very poly heavy, so hopefully your server comes with a lot of bandwidth.  A lot of default trees in Arbaro, and POVTree are 75-90mb each,

Very interesting experiment. Thanks for posting your screenshots.

I'd be interested in seeing some test renders and your shader settings. I learn something new every time I read such posts. :-)

Did you ever get a copy of the free Flaming Pear "Cumulus" plug-in that AgentSmith hosted for a while? You could make some dandy "poof" sprites with alphas using that.

Here's my version in a Carrara render-
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1409103.
Both images look better if you click for larger image size.
Oooops! Sorry for the sidetracking.
*Bwtr- Thanks Brian, I forgot about them.
*Pauljs- Thanks for the shader.
*MarkBremmer- Wow! That looks exactly like well-worn leather. Any chance for a shader freebie, or at least a glimpse of your shader tree set-up. Thanks.

Thanks sparrownightmare. I'll try your "recipe" out tonight. Much appreciated.

I also would be interested in such a shader, and for the very same reasons. Anyone have some cherished leather shader recipes you'd like to share? ;-)

I also tried exporting a terrain at default resolution with a texture map, but the import into Bryce was decidedly unlovely. The mesh wasn't bad, but the texture map was Ughh! I'm no expert, so maybe there are workarounds that will give better results. If Carrara could give better, more usable results for exporting trees and terrains it would be a "must-have" for the users of even higher end apps. Good thing I'm happy with using Carrara as my main renderer/animation app and that it handles its own plant "primitives" so efficiently.

I went into the plant editor and clicked to put checkmarks in the Full Detail Mesh and Show Leaves boxes. Then, while I was still in the plant editor, I clicked on Edit in the main screen>
Convert to Other Modeler. From there a dialogue box opens and gives you the choice of using either the Primitive, or Vertex Modeler. I clicked on the Vertex Modeler...Big Mistake! Carrara locked up completely and when I went into Task manager to see what was going on, Carrara was using more and more memory until it stopped dead at 688,368K. My Task Manager even froze up, until I opened up another Task Manager Window and shut Carrara down.

I must have been feeling brave because I went right back(after doing a restart) and tried the other option, the Primitive Modeler. Everything went swimmingly it seemed. I exported the converted tree as a.obj file and it didn't take Carrara too long to do the conversion. When I looked at the .obj model I was a little shocked to see that the file size was 190MB!

I don't have XSI, or any other rendering app. on hand to test with, so I used Bryce5.1 to import the mesh to see what it would look like. After a half-hour the mesh finally imported successfully but without textures. The .obj file had a 399kb mat. file, but it was all black, so I assigned some
default Bryce materials to the various tree parts.
Here is a Carrara render of the original source tree...

Thanks a lot for this link Quest! I also find this topic fascinating.