Fake fir-like trees

[AzurePlanet]

I've made some "firs" using only a surface layer with its displaced child.
The displacement function is a power fractal shader.
My porpouse was faking trees on global scale, but getting a good result even at local scale.
I'm almost satisfied with this, however do yo have some ideas to improve my project?

[rcallicotte]

Nice job.  Not sure I have any suggestions, having never tried this before.  Wonder if there is a way to mask various (but subtle) shades of green amidst your trees.

[bigben]

Looking good. The trick now would be to find a distance at which it could replace billboard trees. The first image is probably somewhere near that point. I'd probably use billboards for that, but it partly depends on the rest of the scene.

[Njen]

This reminds me of my experiment in making the fake stone shader look like trees. I can't find my original thread, so I'll post the image again.

[AzurePlanet]

Thank you all for your suggestions! 

I have many ideas to develope but I'm limited enough by my baby-skills in the proper use of this huge wonderful software...
For example... I can't figure out how I could use a distance shader to replace my fake trees with true ones... ...specially if I would this effect all around my planet.
The only thing I can do is experimenting, experimenting, experimenting... (and so on!)

[su_liam]

Here's a link to that fakestone-trees disussion.

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=285.0

I wonder if there isn't more of a speed bump with the powerfractal-based method?
Is there any possibility of a more detailed description of the nodes in either of these two methods? Better yet, how about clipfiles?!?

Thank you for reading.

[AzurePlanet]

Some people asked me to release a clip of my old fir-like trees, so I decided to post the complete project.
Here it is, you can use it as you please!

[rcallicotte]

Cool, AzurePlanet!  This is fantastic.

[heavenlywarrior]

Thank you AzurePlanet! Your trees are reaaaly cool!

[Vulthoom]

Thanks! They work really well.