The Adventures Of Hamish: Trees and grass

I made some trees and grass this week. The trees didn't start off very well. The green I used was too saturated and the dark line made it not fit in with the rest of the scene. I also had some trouble deciding how much realistic texture I wanted as opposed to how much abstract colour. This is the first batch of trees I made:

But a couple of days later when I opened the program I realised they wouldn't work and went about changing them. I didn't have to do that much though. I knew I wanted to get rid of those black lines and make the edges less circular. I put a very faint spiral thing on there to break up the even texture. I ended up with these, and then made a couple more slight alterations seen in the last few pictures.

I then started on duplicating the grass I had done earlier. I made a few more sizes so all the tufts wouldn't be the same length. Also shown is the final tree, one that is a slightly bluer green so they aren't all exactly the same.

The shadows don't work properly in Maya (most likely fixable, but I don't need to worry about it at this stage), but I'll work on setting up proper lighting at a later date. I plan on importing the scene into a game engine and lighting it there and seeing how it looks.

One thing I need to figure out is how they make grass in (recent) games look good. Mine are far too obviously 2D planes arranged in a star shape from above. I think I just need to add a heck of a lot more, but maybe more importantly, make the radius smaller so the star shape isn't as obvious.