Yesterday I spent a day in the forest instead of working on this. Can't help it, I always prioritize hiking and road trips over staring at the screen. So technically this isn't a weekend project anymore. The deadline has been broken. Who would have thunk it! 🙂 But I digress.
Now for the tricky part. The plan is to use some kind of procedural stippling to render the texture of the trees. I'm starting with a polka dot pattern shader. It's composed of two rows of tiled circular distance fields. The rows are shifted in such a way that circles form a honeycomb pattern. This will ensure maximum surface coverage.
Furthermore, circle radii can be controlled per cell by a rng or a noise texture. Likewise for the center offset, to break the distribution uniformity a bit.
And, of course, the color can be varied per cell too. All together now for a bit of fun:
The idea here is to drive some of these parameters with ramped/noised diffuse and possibly a specular illumination term.