Not a bad idea. I might go collect some new pine branches tomorrow and photograph them. Just a major pain to extract them from the background, even when taking photos over a keycolor background.
I'm sure that could boost the realism quite a bit. Only thing that worries me is performance. Fps can drop pretty bad when up close to the tree. It's quite a bit of detail for a game object. I probably need to manually create some LOD stages for it to counter-balance that. Manually mipmapping it might not be a bad idea either.
