Converting Paint Effects to Poly looses leaves and grass

I'm working with Maya to learn to create realistic environments, and have been digging into the subtleties of PaintEffects for creating various plants. What I'm curious about stems from the process of converting the PaintEffects plant(s) to polygons for rendering with Mental Ray, which appears to have a limit on the poly count it can handle.

For example, I've created a PaintEffects plant variation that has plenty of leaves so it looks like it should. But, if I then use the paint brush and, in one stroke, try to paint a number of bushes all at once and then convert them to polygons, only the first bush usually has leaves. The others bushes are bare, no leaves, because apparently a poly count limit gets reached that exceeds what all the other leaves would require.
The same kind of thing applies in trying to paint grass onto a large area...converting to polygons usually wipes out a chunk of the grass, and you have to go back and fill a little at a time.

Crazily, if I paint one bush at a time and then convert them all to polygons, that works and they all have leaves. So, it appears that it's a limit on an individual stroke of the paint brush..trying too much in one stroke. But it would sure be sweet if there was some way to tell Maya to do whatever it has to do and just put the leaves/grass in there since it will all end up in there eventually.

Maybe there's a work-around for this that I haven't found yet, so I'd appreciate any ideas on how best to do this. All I really need to do is to be able to fill up more distant areas so it looks like it's a wide region of grassland, or lowlands covered with bushes. I can work the foreground in more detail...but having to go in tiny batches to cover large background areas is a pain.
Thanks,
JTT

Converting Paint Effects to Poly looses leaves and grass

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