Been playing around with different ways of making trees.  For anyone who's familiar with 3D, the lighting on these trees is actually done by editing the normals.  So, I made a mesh that's basically a ball of branches (like a tri-cross except a little more complex), then I edited the normals to all face the same direction.  I duplicate the ball a bunch of times to make a tree shape, then rotate the Z axis to simulate shading.  Since the normals are all pointing up, the branches in the ball are all shaded the same, and rotating it increases shading on the whole thing.

My facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LucasPaakh/