tree made of planes has "planar look"

hb79

I'm hoping somebody can help me with this. I'm trying an experiment with this simple tree in Marmoset Toolbag 2. How can I lose the planar look of this tree. I've searched everywhere and tried bending vertex normals in maya but the results are worse.
Do I need to bend vertex normals? If so, how do I know where to point the vertex normals? Is there a trick with lighting and the materials that I am not doing? I'm also getting bad results with hair. Does anybody have any tips on how to make intersecting hair planes in Marmoset Toolbag 2 look good? Please take a look at the attachment. I have some screen shots there. The tree in Marmoset has the default vertex normals by the way.
Thanks in advance.

NeonMonkey

Have you tried using vertex color to light the tree instead of using the default lights? Just a thought.

ZacD

You need more polygons, the reason the the right most reference image has a bit better shading than yours is because there's extra splits and normals where those meshes intersect.