One way to improve your trees is to first identify how trees work, so I’ll give you a short essay on trees.
Click for mini essay on trees
Trees try to absorb as much light as they can so they can use the energy to grow and produce seeds and succeed as a specie. They do this by efficiently covering as much area with their leaves where sunlight reaches. A simple example is a maple tree, which grows its branches in a spherical way since spheres are optimal shapes:
However, this only works if there is a lot of room for the trees to grow. In other areas such as jungles with a lot of flora packed in one place, trees will try to grow really tall to ‘steal’ light from their peers. This often leads to trees with most of their leaves at the top:
Unfortunately, a tree’s leaves are rather fragile, so in cold climates they can easily get damaged. That’s why there are certain types of trees such as pine trees that ‘roll up’ their leaves for extra thickness and stability:
Sunlight is not the only resource a tree can live off of though; They also need water, which they absorb through their roots. To reach maximum efficiency, a tree’s roots branch out through the soil in all sorts of directions. This also makes it harder for a tree to fall over during storms. Usually you don’t see much of a tree’s roots (depending on the type) but when the ground around a tree erodes for whatever reason, roots near the surface might be revealed. This often happens near rivers where water continuously causes erosion on the sides:
It should also be noted that as trees grow taller, they also grow in width, so branches and roots that are far away from the tree’s base are much more thin than the ones near the origin (as can be seen in the picture above).
With this essay in mind, we can now identify some areas that can be improved.
In your original post your trees only had few leaves compared to its size. On top of that the leaves weren’t distributed in a logical manner. Only the top part of the tree contains leaves. However what if sunlight hits the side of the tree during sunrise? That’s some lost efficiency! You should totally add some branches with leaves on the sides.
Additionally, as the trunk of a tree branches out, so should the thickness. This way the thickness of branches shrinks in a somewhat linear manner. However looking at your original trees, this doesn’t happen. There aren’t any branches and your trunk doesn’t shrink fast enough, resulting in an odd looking top part:
Here are some trees I made a little while ago to analyze:
These aren’t perfect in any way and are somewhat abstractified so they do not look super realistic, but you can still see some core aspects in them. The maple tree on the left branches out at the top with branches shrinking in size. Both trees also have extra thickness at the bottom indicating that there are roots below them. And the pine tree on the right on has a cone shape which allows for more sunlight to be absorbed in areas packed with pine trees.
Hope this helped!
I’ve been trying to figure out how I should handle my forest area so I think the part in your mini-essay should help with that. I’ve been meaning to look into how I can fit branches into my no-rotation-allowed style. Not sure if I will figure it out but we’ll see.
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