Ways to make a tree

This weekend I spent my time trying to settle on the right approach to making the trunk. My options in my head, and conclusions were this (keep in mind this is for a base mesh, not something to bake a normal from):

Speedtree -> don't own, cant export from demo version, UDK only viable for now, that one is out

Hand model -> viable, but slow, unwrapped can suck

Zbrush -> doable, but fine branch work gets tricky and slow

Paint effects -> control is limited, but has good UV options

I spent my weekend trying out each option and decided to get a test mesh in from both zbrush, and from paint effects. The zbrush one turned out alright, but was not worth it's time at all for the final shape (something I could have hand modeled in no time flat).

Something of interest to note was that decimating a sculpt to put my texture on, did let me fiddle around with what differences geo levels made. I tried 2 meshes, one at 1k tris and another at 4k and noticed that because I was rendering with tessellation, the levels made no difference. For my paint effects attempt, I kept things super low (especially on the smaller branches) to see what kind results super low poly work would bring in.

Again, it was all tests. For the most part I wanted to learn about different workflows and experiment with finding something that worked. My final call will be to use paint effects. Honestly the main reason for this is converting paint effects to polygons in maya makes for a UV perfect tree (a HUGE time saver). Looking at what I had at the end, there were some things to take note of:

-4 divisions is just too small for medium branches
-My texture is effective at certain scales for covering up mesh intersection (a big worry of mine)
-Variety in model silhouette can hide lots of repeating texture-ness (a real world I swear)
-Tessellation breaks down a bit with a global scale on tiny branches. I may make a non tessellated material for those branches.
-UV scale can change a bit between branch sizes but the small branch sizes need a smaller UV scale in general to get rid of some of that ugly noise.

Anyway tomorrow night Ill make my final base mesh pretty quickly (probably keeping it as a paint effect so I can add leaves through that method later) and move forward from there (I'm thinking twigs and leaves coming soon).