Tree shape

[PutraenusAlivius]

I think the best way to make low poly trees that are sub 1000 polys is to make a cylinder for the trunk, say 8 sides, and just use intersecting planes with an alpha texture for the branches. In Photoshop its just a black background, and the branch is selected and made into an alpha channel, and saved out as a DXT5, then I just use the same file in the alpha slot in the material editor. As soon as you start to make the branches in 3D, the poly count will skyrocket if you end up modelling a lot of them. Here's a tree I made, its a bit crap but its poly count is only 300, you could probably do a lot better with careful placement of the planes. It would be a fair bit less without the broken twigs near the bottom too.

Adding the leaves is a similar process right?