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how about a compromise? doing whole branches as billboards, in this type of tree is pretty easy. You create 3 or 4 different branches, then you scatter them pivoting with random "z" rotation thru the main "pole" all the way up and little variation on the "up/down" axis, and they should look much better than 2 planes billboards, and they wouldn't be an overload, I'm sure you could pull 1K per tree and look good with this method. as a bonus you could add a little "volume" to the branch so it didn't look too stiff.
Anyway, as I said, great work so far.

with scale error! everything looks like a toy

@Kubo :I have created medium poly trees with flat textured branches and used them at the begining of the project, but they had a toon look. I will try to modify them. I will experiment more. Billboards work fine, but they have to track the camera and can cast a shadow correctly only if there is an orthogonal shadow caster on them.

@ Elvissuperstar007 : There is no scale error : the whole scene including the far mountains is 4kms x4kms, scale is reset to 1 on each object, the reference is 1meter, and it is exported/imported in Octane with 1 meter to 1meter...

I think that what gives the scale model effect is that I used a strong DOF effect to blur the bad billboards close to the camera. On real photo, the DOF would probably be less noticeable. Also, the texture of the mountain is too low res imho (2048x2048). I plan to bake a new texture in 4096x4096 or higher, but only if I can fill the scene with enough good trees first.

I love those renders in the second post, very good work.
If you are planing to animate the scene the billboard problem won't be very noticeable with some post process,because the images are moving and you can take the attention of the viewer's eye to a certain interesting active object in the scene.
In stills it's different because the viewer have all the time to explore and evaluate the image.
And yes, kubo's idea is good, and I use it a lot of time in animation.

I am currently exporting a scene with 1000 trees of less than 1000 vertices each. Trees with Heavy snow will be more difficult to fake.

I think that I will have to make low res copy of my current ground to be used as particles emitter, because currently there are too many overlapping trees, and they are very slow to remove due to the number.

Well, for the snow, it'll require you hand paint the branches a little, and add a soft bump map, you could use a mask bigger than the actual branch map, and use it as a material mix with an even scale (say 3.3x) which would asure you that it doesn't tile. Also keep in mind that even thou this trees make it able to fit many more they eat maxsamples rates as suckers.

First render with new 2.5D trees : modelled trunk, few low poly naked branches on top and textured distorted flat branches with 9 vertices.

Rendered with Alpha, and sky composited in Photoshop Elements.

952 vertices per tree. 1000 trees in the scene. These trees are a bit too "bald". I plan to make other textures for the same branches with less transparent parts, and also an other kind of branches to be used vertically, instead of horizontally. They should look better for heavy snow seen from distance (like the high poly trees beside the house).

The current scene weights 1798.8MB/2879MB available on my GPUs.
8 800 198 triangles.

I can enlarge the scene a bit , and add mountains on an other side to allow more camera angles. I can also add few more high poly trees here and there in interesting places where I can put the camera, to get an high poly tree in foreground. I also have to rebake the mountain texture to get one with higher resolution (in fact three textures for Diffuse, Normal and AO).

much, much nicer. It's looking great btw

Very nice again, but why are you using so many trees?why don't you just use what the camera will see?

As I plan to do an animation with the camera moving through the landscape, I need a complete scene.

As the export time is around 12 minutes, and the loading time around 6 minutes, it is also easier to work on only one ocs file.