Five attempts and it was never good. The last one is better than the cabbage
that prompted the complaint, and "better than the version you called ugly" is
not a standard worth shipping against — every other model here would have to
carry it.
The constraint underneath is real and worth recording, because it is not a
tuning problem and no sixth attempt was going to find it. The kit's budget is
2500 triangles a model. The oak wanted a bole you can see, limbs radiating out
of it, and a dome of foliage over the lot; at 2500 that is roughly 128 for the
trunk, 880 for the boughs and 1400 for the crown, and 1400 buys about forty
masses. Forty masses hung on twelve limbs is twelve clusters, and twelve
clusters do not make a dome — from a third of the compass you see the gaps
between them. A turntable says so plainly where a single three-quarter view
does not, which is the other thing to keep: I judged this model on one angle
for four rounds.
Everything else in this kit is something a person made, with flat faces and
straight edges, and lowpoly is not a compromise for those — it is close to how
they are actually built. A tree is the one subject where the budget genuinely
bites, and the honest options were to except it from the budget, to abandon
realism for a deliberately stylised shape, or to drop it. Dropped.
Out with it goes the `leaf` slot and its palette key, since the oak was the
only thing using either. Back to thirteen slots. `bark` stays, because the log
pile uses it; `limestone` stays, because the trough and the grindstone do.
`scripts/probe-tree.ts` goes too — it measured one model against one pair of
photographs and there is no longer a model.
37 models, 30 390 triangles, thirteen material slots, all checks pass, 0
floating cases, GLB round-trip clean, Conformant, documentation in step.
CRT
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