Hi Marque, yeah, on the plus sign or a blue menu option, you click and hold the mouse button down so you see the selections you can choose from in the list. The shaders are very powerful in Carrara, don't be afraid to experiment with them to make cool effects. I recently got the standalone version of tree druid, to make different tree presets to use in Carrara... but I think you don't need it at first. First get used to working with the Carrara plugin, and then you can upgrade to the standalone if you want to make TDD files for use in Carrara Tree Druid, or obj files if you want. (for me, I got it to make TDD files, as I'm happy using the plugin most of the time!) I think the instructions aren't very clear on the site... let me try and simplify it. make a tree with tree druid in the assemble room. change to the shader room by clicking the paintbrush at the upper right corner of the screen. Multchannel will be diplayed on the top of the shader in the blue pulldown menu. click on it, using the pull down menu and click on Complex Shaders, and choose Layers List. Multichannel will now be underneath Layers list. Click on Multichannel again, and choose Parametric mapping. its going to fall down with a list of your tree materials for applying shaders. Where it says Parametric Mapping apply to Whole Object, underneath it will be the Multichannel again. click on the box (not the blue dropdown menu)where you see Multichannel so its highlighted in yellow. Press shift key, hold shift down, and click and drag the yellow highlighted box, to where you see the next Parametric mapping (the Plus sign underneath the Parametric mapping part) you'll have copied the Mulitchannel part of the shader to a new section! You don't need the part of this shader that applies to the entire object, I have deleted it by highlighting that one in yellow and hitting the Delete key. Some of you might need it, I just don't and so I got rid of it. You can as well make it not do anything by making all its options None, as well. You just need the tree materials to shade it. When you have textured the trunk as you like, you can copy by highlighting and shift click dragging its Multichannel shader again to texture the boughs and limbs with the same shader, saves you some work. Hope I'm clearer here! take care, Robin