Alright, finally my finals are over and I have plenty of time to finish this. I quickly made up some limbs for the christmas tree, since itll only be showing several limbs at the most.

My new stump is how I should go about making the needles on the limbs. Modify a current Paint Effects brush to look like one or find some custom made one?.. It's either that or do them individually out of polys as well, which would be "fun".. But if that's the only way I'll get it to look realistic enough, then I'll get to workin on making a bunch of needles. Just wanted to see if you guys had any other ideas, before I tried.

In the meantime, I'm goin to read up more on paint effects, first time using them

Oh, about the attached image, I will smooth out the limbs before I start to place needles on, as well as will be adding many more limbs to the scene. I took quite a bit of time and studied the branches on my actual christmas tree, they are more complex then I thought haha. I can't help it, Im a perfectionist.