Creating plants from alpha in new ways?

Has anyone found creative ways of making plants from alpha textures besides the standard 3-billboards-at-different-angles method?

I've made a very nice patch of roses by texturing the inside/outside of a hollow cylinder, and duplicating it twice with slightly different rotations and center offsets. I've also seen people create realistic wheat fields and rice paddies by overlaying multiple hollow squares.

I've also created a very nice pine tree by cutting and tapering cylindars so the tops meet at a point and the bottoms form a circle. That is how I created the arbor project megaprim pine tree. It works for plants that naturally taper inwards, but doesn't work to well for thinks like bushes.

There's still a slight glitch with the 3 billboard technique, at different angles it looks odd. Squashing the angles sometimes helps (say a 15 degree angle instead of a standard 60) if the viewing angle is going to be limited (like when the plant is against a wall) and sometimes giving different heights helps create volume as well.

What I'd like is a more rounded look that doesn't glitch out at a prim edge - and I'll keep experimenting of course, but was wondering if some new methods have been found that work good.

Thanks.

If the plant will be seen against a wall, placing it on the outside of a half-cylinder works fairly well. You can see it in Peronaut (look for the stained glass gazebo to the east of the park, on the downhill side ofthe gazebo). That is 2 big cylinders, with a repeated tree texture used at smaller than tree-size to look like bushes.

I've made some decent looking espaliered trees with flat prims against a wall

For low-growing plants, like ground cover and lantana or verbena, take a picture of the plant from above, texture it as a circle fading to alpha square, and place it over a half-sphere mound.

Alpha textures applied to Sculpties might have some intersting effects. In fact this might be one of the best first uses for this new prim.

I have seen some great trees where the textures were applied to partial spheres and curves for the foliage clusters.

The leaves on my sunflower plants are on a hollow, profile-cut torus with 4 revolutions.

I normally use the method described above..

There are other better ways as well, best to play around and experiment