video-game-foliage:

Evergreens covered in snow.

These trees use the standard evergreen trick of stacking a bunch of cones on top of each other with a cylindrical trunk in the middle. Drop on a repeating texture and do some vertex position distortion on the model in your 3D modeling program of choice (RIP in Peace, Softimage) and you have a pretty decent fir tree.

One odd result of this common technique is that it shows tree branches getting lower as they get further out. That’s true in a lot of trees - and one would assume that snow does not help the matter - but on many varieties of fir tree the branches raise upwards over the run of the branch.

Cones are simple to produce, have less performance impact than more complex solutions, and not inaccurate. Going with the cones solution also precludes you from creating evergreen trees with the upward-sloping branches. It’s one of the more subtle ways in which technical solutions place limits on what foliage gets created.

Team Fortress 2 (2007)