SpeedTree for low poly trees, and the alternatives

Part of How to make low poly trees for games

SpeedTree is the tool most game studios use for trees. It's very good at realistic vegetation with wind, and it's priced for teams that make money. A low poly game often needs neither the realism nor the price. This article covers what SpeedTree does, what it costs, how the engines read its files, and the tools that make low poly trees for less or for nothing. It's part of how to make low poly trees.

What SpeedTree is

SpeedTree is a desktop modeler for Windows, macOS and Linux that builds trees and other plants procedurally. It was made by IDV and is now owned by Unity Technologies, and its product page is on unity.com. The current Modeler is version 10.

It's built around realistic trees: photographed bark and leaf textures on cards, branches that bend, and wind that's authored with the tree. It can make stylized trees too, and its Simplify tool replaces geometry with image-mapped cards for distant or mobile trees. The documentation's example takes a tree from 311,000 triangles to 2,300. It has no low poly preset in the sense of faceted, flat-colored meshes.

It exports atlases and billboards, its own .st and .st9 files for the engines, and FBX, OBJ, USD, XML and Alembic for everything else.

What it costs

From Unity's SpeedTree page, in October 2026:

Indie and Pro are subscriptions with a Unity ID sign-in. There's no perpetual license on the page. The terms don't allow reselling or redistributing the trees you make, which matters if you sell asset packs. Unity's support article on the tiers gives the same limits.

Neither engine includes SpeedTree for free today. Unreal Engine 4 once had a cheaper SpeedTree subscription of its own, but nothing on Unity's or Epic's pages offers one now.

How the engines read SpeedTree files

Unity. Save a .st or .st9 file into the Assets folder and Unity makes a prefab with an LOD Group. Unity 6 added an importer for .st9 with SpeedTree wind and shaders for the Built-in pipeline, URP and HDRP. Unity's manual covers the setup. Unity's old Tree Editor still ships, but it works only with the Built-in pipeline, and Unity says SpeedTree replaces it.

Unreal. Unreal 4.27 and later import .st9, and from 5.1 those trees work with Nanite. The wind runs in the material on the GPU. Epic's page and SpeedTree's import guide cover it.

Godot has no SpeedTree importer. Export FBX or OBJ from the Modeler and you lose its wind and LOD setup.

When a low poly game doesn't need it

SpeedTree earns its price when trees have to look real up close and move convincingly: a forest a player walks through in a realistic game. A low poly game is usually different:

• Its trees are a few hundred to a few thousand flat-shaded triangles, with foliage as closed faceted meshes rather than textured cards.
• Its colors come from a palette texture, not photographs.
• Wind, if any, is a small vertex shader sway, which you can write once for every tree.
• Godot is a common engine for it, and SpeedTree has no Godot importer.

In that case you're paying for realism you'll simplify away. A tool that makes faceted trees directly, or a few hours with Blender, gets there with less.

The alternatives

PolyMason's tree builder runs in the browser and is free, with no login. You choose one of 24 species and adjust the trunk, the boughs and the foliage, each limited to what that species allows. It exports a zip with OBJ, STL and 3MF on one shared palette texture, with flat normals, levels of detail, billboards, and the tree's younger, dead, stump and felled versions. It doesn't export wind data or GLB yet. That's us, and it's built for exactly this case.

Tree It is a free Windows program, updated in May 2026, that makes low poly trees. It exports OBJ, FBX and its own format, with adjustable LOD and vertex-color wind in the FBX. It needs DirectX 9. There's also a version on Steam.

Sapling Tree Gen is a free Blender extension, no longer bundled with Blender. Install it from Edit, Preferences, Get Extensions. It's aimed at realistic trees, but lowering the bevel and curve resolution and the leaf count gets it close to low poly, and Blender exports the result in any format.

EZ-Tree is an open-source browser tree generator under the MIT license. It exports GLB with every level of detail in one file. Its leaves are textured cards, so out of the box it looks realistic rather than faceted.

The Grove grows realistic trees in Blender and Houdini from €99. Its terms don't allow selling the trees, and it's aimed at realistic trees for 3D artists more than at games.

A side-by-side comparison of the tree generators, including the browser demos that come up in search, is in tree generators compared.

Which to use

• A realistic game in Unity or Unreal, with money for it: SpeedTree.
• A low poly game in any engine, with flat-shaded trees on a palette: the tree builder, or Tree It on Windows.
• A Blender workflow where you want to finish the trees by hand: Sapling, then model the foliage yourself.
• A three.js or web project that wants GLB: EZ-Tree.

More in this guide

• How to make low poly trees for gamesThe method behind a low poly tree that looks like its species: the silhouette that identifies it, the trunk, where the boughs leave and how the trunk divides, foliage as a few closed meshes, two greens, triangle budgets, and the export a game engine wants. The same steps work in the builder and by hand in Blender.
• Tree generators compared for game developersEvery tree generator a game developer is likely to find, side by side: what it runs on, what it costs, what it exports, whether it makes low poly trees, and whether it handles levels of detail and wind. SpeedTree, PolyMason, Tree It, Sapling, EZ-Tree, The Grove, and the browser demos that come up in search.

Or build a tree and see what comes out.