The trees in OIE are pretty ugly, but there along the same lines:
Starting with a vertical section of trunc, laid it out as if it was a UV map, You need vertical segments so you can vert edit to get the final shape, maybe 5 vertical segments. The topmost segment should be a single polygon so that they can all meet at a point. The leaves were made from plains - which were laid out in a similar mannor, If you make 4 plains and position them beside the trunc secion, you can save a helluva lot of UV mapping.
(I wish I could sketch on a post! - just ignore the dots)
....../\
..../....\
../........\
/______
|............|
|............|
|______|
|............|
|............|
|______|
|............|
|............|
|______|
|............|
|............|
|______|
That should leave you with a section of bark, and 4 plains for bushes. If you duplicate the section of bark in a row, you can use that to form the actual trunc - do that, but don't get too fidly with the vert editing because your gonna copy it several times and edit it anyway - try and get a sorta cone shape. Now you should copy that and put it out of the way, and use a copy as the trunc, like vertice edit it so it looks tree like. Now depending on the number of segments you want to use, you can duplicate the trunc and add it as a tree limb. It won't matter if the branches use the same texture as the trunc, because the texture will be scaled anyway and it'll look fine. The tricky bit will be getting the branches onto the trunc neatly - when being ultra conservative with polys like I was with OIE, it is easier, because I was dealing with 3 sided truncs, the branches snapped right onto polygons - you'll no doubt want more detail, but as long as you can get the base verts locked on reasonably neatly, it should be fine.
Now you should have a basic tree - albeit without leaves. That's nice and easy though, just copy the bush plains several times and pepper them all over the tree as much as you like - this won't affect the poly count a great deal but the textured model will run slower if you overdo it.
You don't have to UV map it (which with traditional post UVing would be a pain in the a$$). You can add a bone structure, I had a bone from the base of the trunc to the start of the branches, then from there to the top of the tree. With code you can make the tree's sway in the wind with simple limb rotation commands (just make sure you add a few dummy keyframes).
Van-B
The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!.
