Only way to have a good looking tree is spamming 1000000 vertices

>>1012628 (OP)
Hire me, I'll sculpt you a tree.

Actually, nevermind, just turn on dyntopo and use snake hook in sculpting mode. Thank me later.

yeah trees are just like every other organic thing. they need hella polies, and when you cut corners everyone notices.
its just a real shame that if you want a cool forest you need a million trees each with a million leaves. and they all better jiggle and sway just right because everyone has seen a real tree and will spot a fake instantly.

>>1012648
>its just a real shame that if you want a cool forest you need a million trees each with a million leaves
>Literally missing the forest for the trees
geg.

>>1012628 (OP)
You wanna make trees anon? Funny you should mention that I'm making vegetation props too atm. The trick is in smart use of textures, pic rel is a comparison between two models: on the left is one I downloaded from opengameart dot org (1400 faces, with front AND back faces on the branch planes), on the right is a pine I modeled and textured myself (1100 faces).

The downloaded asset looks better for two reasons:
1) the individual branches consist of 9 face planes arranged in a T shaped section, they're also fairly large, while my branch shape arrangement used a near flat shape and they were a tad small; needless to say the smaller the planes you use for your branches the more you're going to need to create the foliage of your tree, so it's best to make your branch planes large instead if you can get away with as is the case with trees (you want entire braches to be planes instead of actual 3D geometry, using a plane for every leaf is poly suicide, do not do that, once again use planes for branches which include the image of the branch itself with leaves on it); in that case you also must make sure the leaves of your texture are small since the branch plane is going to be fairly big;
2) the tree itself is of a more interesting shape, purely for the way it looks in real life.

I mentioned opengameart dot org previously, and I highly recommend you download some of the assets there to study them and learn how others did their own veggies. Download the ones that look the greatest to you and download them so you can analize how they accomplished that result and implement their technique in your own work

Pic rel is how you may want to model and texture your branches.

As for the log/trunk, I suggest to use Bezier Curves > in the side panel thingie go to Object, Geometry and give it depth, play around with resolution and shit, sorry it's late I don't remember this part too good > in Edit Mode extrude vertices as needed > still in Edit Mode, and with a vertex selected, hit Alt + S to adjust the size of that vertex > once you're satisfied with the shape of the log, go to Object > Convert to Mesh > give it your bark texture (the converted curve already comes UV unwrapped)

>>1012654
Not OP, but another trick for dense tree foliage is to use custom normals to give the tree more percieved volume and simulate light piercing through leaves. Just google "custom normals for foliage" for example pictures. You don't have to manually edit the normals either, you just need to make them radiate either outward from the center of the tree or from the centers of major branches. You can do that in blender using a modifier.

>>1012654
>>1012657
Reminds me of the oak trees in runescape, jesus christ anon, are you making a game for the Nintendo DS?

>>1012658
Oh cool I'll have to look into that, thanks for the rec anon

>okay ill just make a complex building, 700 tris seems reasonable
>now one small tree
>1200 tris
Actually fuck trees who let these fuckers be twisty AND round? fucking pick one

>>1012657
This is great, but only works if you have a limited amount of foliage in your scene
If there are multiple rows of transparent objects, blender will quickly reach the maximum amount of transparent interactions, replacing the background with solid black at some point.
In order to minimize the transparent area, some models even go as far as assigning each leaf its own polygon

>>1012834
This is true is something to remain wary of. It's true that smaller transparent objects are less likely to overlap, thus making transparency faster and less glitchy.
However, you can increase Blender's maximum transparency overlaps. In Cycles at least. By increasing the number of transparency bounces. I'm not sure what can be done in Eevee. With 1024 total transparency bounces, you can get some real dense foliage before the black artifacts begin to show.