I am trying to create an airfield scene and it doesn't need to be so realistic to the actual place, but I am trying to match it up for some live action shots in closeups. The airfield has a line of trees and I have imported some very realistic tree models, so they ended up really lagging everything. Renders took a long time, I'm new at this so I didn't even consider this.
After researching, I decided to use the Decimate function on each of the trees to make it less laggy, with less faces, but it wouldn't let me do it for all of them at the same time so I had to do it one tree at a time. Now what has happened is with each time I decimated a tree, it took exponentially longer time to execute. I have done only 7 trees at this point, but the lag is so severe that just opening the file takes at least 10 minutes. Have I done something wrong, or is this just how it goes with foliage?
My computer uses the Mac M4 with 24GB memory. It should be enough, according to research?