Wasn't it mathfan who wrote:
>Hi,
>I'm trying to make a nice landscape picture, but I don't know how to make
>forest. I've tried things like tomtree, but when I try to place several
>copies of the tree around on my height field the scene becomes so
>complicated (~140000+ frame level objects) even without foliage on the
>trees. Does anyone know how I can make simple trees that look realistic so
>they can be used for my forest project?

Paul T Dawson once published a tree generator that created the tree as a
single mesh, which renders very efficiently. It's then possible to
#declare a small number of such trees, and then plant many copies of
each of them with changes in scale. A simple scene containing 8000 trees
takes 39 seconds (26 seconds to parse and 13 to trace).

The trees aren't as realistic as Tomtree trees, but if you're planting
large numbers of them, they can't all be close to the camera, so you
could use Tomtree for the close ones and Meshtree for those further
away.

Unfortunately, Paul's website seems to have disappeared sometime since
1996, and I can't seem to Google any online copies of meshtree. However,
the help file does say "This file is 100% free, public domain, copy and
share with all, etc." so I could let you have a copy.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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