Picking up from yesterdays efforts I began furiously reducing the quality of my tree. The first attempts face counts were 1/3 branch, 2/3s leaf. Given that the end goal of these trees is to be projected onto a wall in the dozens, I don't think the branches are really in need of that much geometry.
So the face count for branches was reduced to 1/20th of what it was, with very little loss of quality. The leaves however, did not like this change. Something about the greatly reduced number of faces caused the leaf generation to almost completely fail. A lot of work ensued to fix this, and unfortunately it required ruining Speedtree's great generation system.
So I replaced the default texture of one little clump of pine needles, with my starburst horror, as well as replacing the small triangles Speedtree normally uses, with massive planes. Clean? No. Efficient? Oh yes. This change dropped the face count by 90%. Admittedly it doesn't look amazing up close but we're never going to see the trees that close up so it's fine, right?
This is where the tree stands now. The original tree was just over 2 million faces, this bad boy is sitting at 11 thousand. That's 0.5% of the original, not bad. Honestly though, I'm pretty happy with it, it's a bit sparse but besides that it does just look like a pine tree. Mission success, for now.
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