With your leaves being mapped and all, you probably don't need to subdivide them, you could probably just use a rectangle that is divided through its width a few times and have it curved. However, then you would have problems with the shadow, which will then be a rectangle, so you can use the knife tool to cut along the image of the transparency map and delete the outer points. Also, I've noticed that if you have too many transparent faces in a line that the camera sees, (if they are transparency mapped), when rendered, you end up with the areas that are exposed to be transparent being black. I don't know if it has to do with the ART Renderer (cause thats the one I used, I should try the scanline and see if that fixes it...
), If it is, I would expect it to do something with the maximum reflection value for the rays (which I can't seem to find
), but I digress
. That should help with the poly count anyway, and you may be able to find a way to excape the issue of the black areas. Oh, and if you want the transparency map to take effect without rendering, go to view->preferences, and you should have a option under the name of "transparency" or something like that (I'm not on a computer with Anim8or or I'd check for the exact name), and you can turn it on. That should get it working. Sorry for my tiresome monologue, but I hope this helps
.