There is probably some artist whose life's work is being The Tree Guy. Art direction called for a Japanese maple to be in the background of that shot and, by God, TTG made it so. Can't render scenes in a forest? Call in TTG -- he can take a clipper to the topiary and knock off 80% of the polys off a stockart tree without taking away 1% of it's tree-ness. When the companies which make automated tree-production software (n.b. this is A Thing [+] and it costs several thousand dollars a license IIRC) needed recommended parameters for aesthetically pleasing trees, who do they call? TTG, that's right. Give him 30 minutes and a high-end PC to do simulated annealing and he'll come up with a new species of tree, unknown to nature, which nonetheless would fool botanists because it looks like it <i>should</i> exist, somewhere, maybe in wet regions of Laos.<p>I really feel for video game artists. In some ways, they're like the medieval painters of our age -- the ones who would paint gorgeous frescoes in parts of cathedrals which were <i>planned</i> to be occluded in further construction, because if that part of the wall was unpainted God would see it. I walked into a room in a Final Fantasy game once, blew through it in 7 seconds, then went back and thought "Wait, somebody -- heck, probably a team of someones -- spent <i>most of a year of their life</i> getting this room ready for those seven seconds."<p>It's inspiring, in a way, and also makes me triply glad that I am not in the game industry.<p>[+] Edit: Representative example: <a href="http://www.speedtree.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.speedtree.com/</a>