I’ve been working all day long to make a decent looking tree in Blender. I didn’t follow any specific tutorial, so i had to find my own way to do it.I think it is a good way to learn.I was hoping you could give me some serious critics on how to improve it. Unfortunately, I can’t add any more branches, at least not by the moment, because it makes Blender crash, i hope I’ll find a way to solve this.
Test 1
Test 2
Test 3
That’s really nice. Good texturing and lighting - particularly on the last picture.
Did you arrange the leaves using the particle system?
ooh - some close-ups would help, is this for a game or a still, or an animation?
That might help with my crits, but at the moment it looks like you should try some bump maps and add some more leaf variation.
Some smaller branches could be rendered onto planes and added tactically 
I modelled the basic tree using curves and the curve to tree script for Blender 2.49b. Then imported the model into Blender 2.58 abd did the same with some minor branches. Joined the little branches and applied a particle system with leaves on them. Then using that minor branches as particles, i distributed them over the main tree using another particle system, ( painting weights, etc.) I think i found a way to make it render faster, avoiding raytracing mainly. It’s for a still picture 
. Gonna update this soon.
