Help with Maxwell and billboard trees

[Delineator]

I was curious if I could get some suggestions on creating billboard trees in Maxwell (using forest pro, of course).

Maxwell only wants to render native maxwell materials and standard materials, BUT I can't get the clipmap to work properly with the standard material type.

The maxwell clipmap material works perfectly with the FPro billboard files, BUT I can't get maxwell materials to work as a sub mat using a multi/sub material.

Basically I want to create a forest using a variety of trees, but I can't really figure out how to do it efficiently. I can create a separate forest for each tree type, but this seems a bit cumbersome, and I don't get any tonal variation amongst a singular type of tree (which may be impossible).

FPro and maxwell seem to work great using 3D trees, but I'd like to get billboard trees working efficiently too.

Any help would be appreciated.

[iToo]

I don't know what may the problem. The multi/sub seems to work fine here.

The problems what i have found using billboards with Maxwell are that GIFs are not recognized (we use them for the opacity maps of the library), and that the fake shadows don't work because Forest Material is not compatible.

[Delineator]

Yes, you are correct. It would appear it works best when the GIF's are changed to simple RGB JPEG's.

Also, it would appear it works best when I select and change the material type from the FPro panel first, and not thru the material editor.

Once I did those 2 things, everything did seem to work out OK. Thanks!