Suggestions for modeling this type of pine tree?

Carabiner

I'm making a coastal/beach scene, and I want to include some scrubby coastal pines like you see in Northwest coasts:



The thing about these is the needle clusters are super dense and conical. I started out with a typical alpha plane'd approach, but even with some intersecting planes it still looks quite flat. Does anyone have any ideas about how to approach these?

One idea I had was to make a very very lowpoly shape (like, just a triangle) for the "core" of the needle cluster, and to then have alpha maps coming off of it to show the needle details. That'd be pretty expensive though so I'm wondering if anyone has other ideas.

Edit: Okay, I had another idea. I can't delete this thread so I'm editing it. I'm going to try making just a big clump for each section of pine clusters, like this very ugly drawing that I did. We'll see how this turns out, and I'm happy to hear if anyone has better ideas!!:

Jonny10

These two source might be of help:

http://simonschreibt.de/gat/airborn-trees/
http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/witness-trees/


I think if you use several small "base" shapes, as outlined in the first article, you could achieve the look you're going for. Worth some experimenting!

Eric Chadwick

If you can edit the vertex normals, this helps avoid that flat look.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/VertexNormal

Obscura

You can take a look at the Kite demo assets by epic, they made a similar pine tree. Depending on the requirements and target platform, it can work, but you'll need lods.
Basically they used cone shapes with alpha. This will result like 40-50k tris at the end, but it looks very dense and good, and a lod can help.