THX, sorry for the delay but here’s how I instanced the palm trees.

I created a particle emitter to emit from the surface of the island, I then changed the emitter to surface.

Then select the palm tree group and the particles and go particles ->Instancer , simple as that really. I’m working on creating various scales and rotations of the plants via a bit of MEL, to give a nice random look to them. (I’m also going to try out a switch shader to give some colour variations to the plants)

Oh with the trees I converted them form paint fx then reduced and quaded the trees as far as I could go without loosing too much detail

I’ve made a bit of progress with the jungle (by creating various different plants and instancing them too) the scene when I run the particle’s and get a nice covering of vegetation for the jungle goes to approx 7 million polys!!!!, I’ll post a pic tonight, its nothing special just wanted to see if my PC would be able to handle it, which it does manage to do!!

Cheers