Requesting short tutorial "setting a tree up for lod0 texture rendering"

[Knitschi]

Yeah I know "don't ask what the devs can do for you, ask what you can do for the devs" but I just want a few hints here.

I am still trying to make my first tree and I have come quite far but there is a final problem. I have to render the lod0 textures for the two crossed planes which will be seen at large distances. The Problem is, that I am very unexperienced in 3dsmax and I don't know how to set up the scene to make a good render. I followed these steps in the "How to create a bunker" tutorial to make the tree look like it will look in bf2

but if you want to see what your multilayered shader looks like, do the following:
•   In the Material Editor, click on any unused shader slot.
•   Click on the button labeled “Standard” like before, and this time choose “DirectX 9 Shader”.
•   In the “DirectX 9 Shader” rollout section, there will be a button labeled with a path like “C:\3dsmax7\maps\fx\Default.fx”. Click on this button and choose “BF2_StaticMesh_A.fx” in this window that pops up. You should now see a list of texture channels similar to before.
•   Click the button labeled “None” next to “Color” and select “MyBase01_c.dds” the same as you did before.
•   Do the same for “Detail”, choosing “MyBase01_de.dds.
•   Finally, do this again for “NDetail no-preview”, choosing “MyBase01_deb.dds”.
•   Assign this new shader to the “My_Bunker” mesh. You should now see something similar to the following:

but what I get in the viewport is this:



But ingame the tree looks like this:



The materials and the renderer have a lot of options and I don't know what to choose to make it work.

So can please anybody who has done this before tell me what I have to do to get a good render of the tree that looks like the tree ingame. Is it possible to get a render which already has the correct alpha channel.
Yesterday I worked around this problem by simply taking a screenshot of the tree in the objecteditor but with this method it is hard to get the proper camera position and you have to make the alpha channel by yourself and I don't know how this is done to get a good result. ATM the lods don't realy fit to each other when blending over like it can be seen here.



Your help would be appreciated   

[Toddel]

well its super easy . in max you allways render the viewport you have active.

take your tree lod0 and copy it sidewards rotate it 90°. then enable "safeframe" in your viewport. this will bring out the area which is inside the later render ( your max outer dimensions)

go to the render settings and enter a 256x256 for your render output size or 512x256 if you need it wider.

now render the tree save the file you recieve and save it as a dds file.

now you create a plane. the size of your tree. uvw your new Lod Texture on it. Make sure only 1 direction is on the plane. Copy your plane and rotate it 90°. uvw the other treeview on this on.

I think your lods looking very good tbh. i am sure you get the idea allready. maybe you must sharpen your LOD Texture a bit . and make sure its 100% in the correct space.

also you can try to use the "catmull" renderer in max. gives sharper results

[Knitschi]

Thanx for the hint with the save frame.

But the main problem is, that my render results show the following:



Here I had the materials applied that are used when exporting the mesh (BF2 StaticMesh2)
The next picture was rendered with the "DirectX Shader" materials applied.



So you can see that these pictures cant be used as texture. I guess that there are some settings in the material- or render-context wrong.

Edit:

Ok I got it!
My problem was, that I lacked the basic knowledge how to set up a normal material with different textures and alpha channel, but I found it out now 

The render I get now is this:



I will make it smaller tomorrow