Yesterday I thought I’d use a particle system to draw the trees. But now that I read up on it, it’s really only for rendering a texture/material and not really for drawing a model like a tree. However, I’ve come across InstancedMesh which will duplicate a model efficiently as long as the model has the same material geometry, and only apply a transform to it. That seems like exactly what I wanted.

The way I’ve randomly placed the trees, they’re covering the lift lines (and eventually when I have the runs mapped out). So, I’m now doing a brute force point distance to line calculation for every tree that I’m plotting. This is hugely inefficient - takes 20s to calculate all the points. The next step is to draw those areas I don’t want trees into a texture map and probably just do a hit test on the tree location. For now it looks quite good with the trees: