Wasn't it Tom A. who wrote:
>I'd like to put a forest in the background of an animation.  The camera 
>won't get close to any of those trees (I'm trying to get Arbora(sp?) for 
>some closer trees), and wondering if anyone's solved this problem 
>before.  Any suggestions?  Since the "park" area is just a plane, for 
>the scenes from very high up I was thinking of putting a second plane 
>about 10 meters above the other one with clear areas and tiny green 
>spots to sort of represent the trees.  (Haven't tried this yet.)

Paul T Dawson once wrote a macro for creating very efficient trees from
meshes. It's a lot faster, but considerably less sophisticated, than
things like POVtree.

You can create a small number of different trees, then plant lots of
copies of them with different scale and rotation to produce variety.
This runs surprisingly fast for a few thousand trees.

For efficient animation, you could a modify the meshtree code so that
that it writes the mesh to a file, then read the mesh from the file in
each frame.

The old website where Paul originally posted the macro is long gone, and
Google can't seem to find any new locations. If you want to give it a
try I could email you a copy.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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