How do you prefer to do trees/forrests?

So I’m in the process of adding a fair amount of trees around my scene which will act as not only map props, but a border for the player. I started by dragging in my tree and realizing after placing a good amount that it causes frame issues. So I started looking into the tree painter.

Apparently it puts it into a 2D billboard until it’s directly viewed in which it turns 3D. Sounds nice, tried laying some out with ones that came in unity and it worked well. But then I tried importing my own tree into the painter and it wouldn’t work. I found after doing a bit of research that it was because it requires you to have a total of one complete mesh and it can’t contain more than two textures. Well this is kinda an annoyance as my tree requires 3, but I dropped it down to a satisfactory 2 and it finally worked. Only now when I paint them they come in sideways… I did some research on this and found the only solution to be to change the model in 3DS Max by turning it sideways so when unity places them rotated, they come up straight.

Huff puff, seems like a bit of an annoyance. But it seems this is what I’m gonna have to do to get my trees in game without run time issues. So I figured I’d ask the community on what their favorite way of laying out these kinda props would be if there are any other options.

EDIT: The above solution about changing the pivot worked by affecting my pivot only and making it point so the tree top was facing the y. However, I find that while it does allow mass production is also doesn’t look as nice despite having good frame rate.

Yeah the unity terrain engine still sux! I solved all the tree issues a long time ago with my coder. The pivot point is one issue solved but be careful the is also going to be a scaling problem with the trees also the billboards don’t match and watch it! Unity terrain trees don’t place with random rotation! The best and fastest solution is to buy a high quality unity tree application if you can afford it. The no cost solution would be to not use unity’s terrain trees and make your own (LOD) that include billboards. I think the best way would be to directly show you my project… I LOD everything including small details and I don’t even use the unity terrain except the terrain itself.