I've been toying lately with making trees out of particle emitters, and it's been going very well, but it is sort of annoying having to let the particle emitter grow and then having to freeze it, and then animating.
So, by letting the particle emitter grow to the shape I want and then converting it to a vertex modeller, I get the geometry I want without all the unneccesary animation controls that would make animating my scene more complex than neccesary.
However, when I convert it to the vertex modeller, I lose the ability to shade each particle as though it were a seperate object; instead of getting one leaf on each particle, I get one giant leaf mapped over ALL of the particles, which is obviously not the effect I'm going for.
Is there any way to convert a particle emitter to vertex modeller without losing the ability to shade each particle as though it were a single object?
Thanks in advance for your help. This is a great community and I have learned a lot from it. If this topic has already been covered, I'm sorry; it didn't show up in my search of the archives.

Not really, unless you want to manually separate each particle. 'S one of the things that really bothers me about Carrara, it doesn't seem that it'd be that much a bigger step to make a MAXlike particle engine that's genuinely useful 90% of the time...