Thanks for the great comments!
Chris: yeah, the leaves are bitmaps on alpha planes. I've attached two images; a wireframe, and another render that shows the leaf detail a bit better.
Hannes: I agree. I have a couple of other trees made with varying foliage colors that are being set in another composition, some are mixed within the same tree and with different levels of leaf density.
I'm still playing with material settings. The last two renders have a specularity setting of 2 and translucency set at 3. I do have spec maps in place, but these levels just seem all wrong. Not to mention the render time hit. The ST models settings were more in line with my normal experience; with spec at .05 to .1, and translucency between .3 and 1. Seems curious as it's just plain old .obj/.mtl for both sets of assets. But this may just be this object and it's assets, we'll see. I also intend to render some of these objects (both ST and TPF) in several other renderers. Mental Ray and VRay via fbx export into Max, and the Vue renderer as well. Curious to see how they compare. But I must say that the native TG renderer, imo, does a very nice job; and considering the trade-offs in creating environments in those other apps, is still the landscape tool of choice for me.
