realistic looking bitmap trees

bitmap trees:
trees take up a lot of rendering time. each leaf has to be rendered seperately, so for an average size tree, having 5000 leaves, archicad has to take the extra time to render each leaf as a seperate polygon. it can take forever if you put trees in your model. without them, your house looks unrealistic and the scene lacks depth. This is why, when create a standard-real life tree, the leaf diameter is 2 to 3 feet and the density is low, around 40. a realistic tree will have a density of 500 to 800 and a leaf diamter of 1.5" to 3". sometimes archicad will crash just showing this many leaves in 3D, without even rendering!

the solution:
use bitmap trees. essentially bitmap trees are cardboard cutouts of actual trees. the background even shows through the branches, just like a real tree. they need to be placed perpendicular to the camera angle before rendering; otherwise they would look narrow and askew or even just like a line, in parallel to the viewer/camera angle. it's pain to move each tree for different views. you can just have different trees for different layers and turn off the ones you don't need in the current render. note: when using the "hand" sketch render option, bitmap trees will appear as rectangles. i have real trees on a seperate layer that i turn on only for "hand" sketches.