So, building the tree manually is something I have no doubt I could do, so I wanted to experiment more with geonode foliage, and here is one iteration of a tree. Benefit that I’m liking with this is that you can easily create infinite variations if you want, just by changing the seeds on things like the positioning, scale and rotations, and that you can even simulate wind by animating the rotation on things like the leaves. This doesn’t look perfect, and I think next I need to look into tutorials on weight painting for geonodes, so I can build a more realistically distributed tree in terms of density and scale, but overall, I really like this method. The leaves could use a bit more work to make them look a bit less rigid as well, but this was more about learning HOW to use geonodes at all, and I’m feeling somewhat comfortable with it, even if I need to keep my reference screenshot up for a while!
With realistic textures including UV mapped leaves. This one is done with just the trunk being modeled.
This was during my experimentation where I added additional sculpted branches to attach the leaf branches to. This one has a more basic textures, but the distribution of branches seems a lot better.
