Modelling a basic tree....

To populate our Essex scenes, I though it may be an idea if we had some low poly trees for the background.
I started with a Standard Primitive Cylinder that was scaled up to taper it. Sections were then moved to form a more realistic trunk shape.



Branches were grown from the trunk by selecting adjacent lines then using the Connect Tool, then Extruding the polygons out.

Vertices were then moved around to make the trunk less uniform.

To quickly populate the tree with leaves, I grabbed an image from Google and isolated it in Photoshop then applied it to a plane. Planes were then copied, rotated and scaled in various positions on the branches.

A basic bark material was also sourced from Google then applied to the trunk and adjusted with the UVW tool.

Here's a render of the final tree model. It looks ok and is not intended to be photo realistic as it's just for the backgrounds.