Hi guys ! 
i’m trying to make a forest with a thousand of trees in 3ds max, and i’ve tried being used Speed tree 2.0 but the result was the rendering time too long, it’s unacceptable. it tooks 10 mins with 20 trees.
Can you show me the best way to create a forest with a thousand of trees not only the rendering time faster but also the polygons is low. or do you know any plugins can do it ! i’m being mad with this thing !
Thanks in advanced !! 
Hai
email: banhminhhai@yahoo.com
Have you tried with “Forest” from ItooSoft?
All bitmap trees, very simple to learn and use.
Theres a free (limited) version.
We use that forest pro Plug-in too, It is great for trees off in the distance at the horizon line or behind the main focus of the rendering, it falls apart if to close to the camera, we switch to Tree storm for trees close up, or if we have too (but hate doing it) we use RCP trees sometimes but we are trying to get away from it. A company called bionatics has a program called natFX i have seen some demos at siggraph that look really cool but they have been too expensive for us…so far 
NatFX
We got in on the NatFX craze last year. They offer a pretty cool utility that allows you to adjust how many poly you need for each tree (poly all the way down to bitmap). The other cool feature of Natfx is that you can set the age of tree from seedling to fully grown.
The drawback is that they don’t offer a good deal for a package of trees. The company requires you to buy one tree at a time. We haven’t bought trees from them in awhile so they may offer a package deal.
We are still looking for good looking cheap trees that render fast. Maybe that is asking to much..
-r
Riltis
Bionatics now do deals if you need to buy multiple seeds, drop them an e-mail, they are more than willing to help…
Cheers
Neil