Is it possible to export an entire tree from Carrara? By entire tree I mean the leaves and small branches as well. I have only been able to export the basic "skeleton" of the tree with just the trunk and main branches. I have no real desire to render outside Carrara because everything I need to make a great landscape is already in the program, but I already mentioned to someone that one of the advantages of Carrara over say Bryce is that you can export your tree models. If not, I may need to "eat some crow",lol.

You'll be glad to know you won't have to "eat some crow"  :)

You can export the entire plant by selecting "full-detail Mesh" in the modeling room.

That's awesome!
Thanks, man. You made my day.

Thanks for the info Discoseven. I had tried exporting a tree I modeled with the "full-detail Mesh" box checked, first as an .obj, then as several other file formats without success. I would get the trunk and main braches to export, but no side branches or leaves.      After reading your reply, I decided to try exporting some of the preset trees and Viola, no problem!  Apparently my tree is either too complex ( too many leaves) or has some other setting that Carrara's export module doesn't like. The default aspen is a fairly simple tree, but even still it weighs-in at a little over 15mb. with the .mat file when exported as an .obj file.  No real complaints here. I am happy that I can model quite complex trees in Carrara and then replicate them by the thousands with no problems within Carrara itself. Why would i even want to go elsewhere,lol?  I used Patrick210's freebie tree shader on this "unexportable" tree in the pic.

No problem :) It is nice to have the option to export. Maybe someday I will need to, but so far it hasn't come up. Now that I say that, I'm sure something will come along and I'll need to export a bunch of trees, but at least we know how to do it :)

I'll be able to cull down the poly count as needed. I tried a default Arbutus(?). It was 650,000 polys :) . That's great for up close; but that much detail isn't needed far away; you don't 'see' it anyhow. I got it down to 90,000 and could probably have gone a bit lower than that and still had a nice looking background tree.
Exported .3ds objects won't open in Max for some reason. Probably a version conflict. .obj objects work fine. The esport is a single mesh w/ single shader, but fortunately Max interprets the exported shader as multi sub-object; so there isn't any problem with editing the leaves, trunk, etc. shaders independently.
This is a great feature. I've been looking for a way to make really good tree meshes for some time now. Just the tree meshes alone are worth what I paid for the app.
Next time I see a 3ds Max user asking where to get good trees, I'll know where to send them .

We've come full-circle now, haven't we Dvlenk6? I realised that you were the person that I was telling about Carrara's plant model export feature,lol. I'm glad I don't have to eat crow. I've had too many of them as pets.

I have at least half a dozen tree object generators; but none of them make trees as nice as Carrara's.
DAZ should make a little stand-alone app. out it and market it seperately. It would be a big seller across the board, I think.
I was right on the verge of ordering WorldBuilder. Glad I don't have to shell out for that. So thanks for steering me in this direction instead.

Yeah, I have about that many on my own computer, tree object generators that is, and I''m liking Carrara's plant modeler more and more. I've gotten some trees out of it that made me go "wow", but then I've always been easily entertained. 
       Another reason I'm glad that you asked the original question, which led to me asking the question that started this post; is that I learned that the hybrid settings really are useful when I kind of dissected the preset aspen tree. I'm going to "backward engineer" it so the settings make sense to me. I've never before had luck with the ramified and hybrid settings.

I have an idea of replicating mass POVTree olive trees(gnarled, hi-poly bases) and using leaf particles emmiters to shape out the foliage. It might take some work, but I imagine someone could come up with some cool and unique vegetation looks that way.

What are POVTrees?

Attached Link: POV-Tree

POV-Tree is a freeware Java-based tree making program designed by Tom Aust. It was developed for use with POV-Ray, but I've used the freeware PoseRay app to convert the POV .Inc file output to .obj files. PoseRay ver 3.10.3   

    It may seem like a hassle to use a POV tree maker and go through the conversion process, but POVTree is one of the only tree making apps, free or commercial, that makes realistic roots as part of the tree.  Many of the presets (9 in all) generate huge files, but they can be very detailed "hero"-type trees. You can have quite a bit of control over how complex the output will be as well. The "olive tree" preset shown above is over 90mb without leaves!   Luckily Carrara5 can use instancing as well as POV-Ray can so such huge trees can still be useful by means of the replicators.

Well; I've had pneumonia for the last week, and it's still going strong... So, I've had some time to play with some trees :)

Here is one after culling the poly count down to 52,000 or so. For anything closer than that (or larger) it would need more polys, I think.

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I found that the exported trees aren't UVMapped. Mapping the leaves is simple, but unwrapping a curved trunk and all the branches is a pretty big job. The branches :cursing:
I've also been looking at using square leaves, and applying a image transmap for the shapes. The transmaps are derived from photographic leaf textures. A 1024x1024, made up of 16 (256x256) similar but not identical leaves with a corresponding transmap seems to give enough variety. The square leaf meshes (I've been using 2x2 planes for far shots, 3x3 or 4x4 for closer) can be twisted around into various shapes w/ mesh noise and/or displacement to add a bit more variety.
The poly counts for the transmapped leaves are much lower, and a photograhic leaf texture looks better, IMO, than any procedural shader.
The render times seem about the same, or slightly less, with the transmapped method, unless I go overboard with the leaf polys. I have to force 2-sided rendering on the leaves either way; but this way, I can force 2-sided on the leaves but not the trunk and branches, so that saves some time.

The main difficulty has been making it look other than 16 leaves copied over the surface. Adding some procedural variation to the image texture and mesh shape has helped.