Instead of using the MakeLive function in maya to retopologize the trees, I used a program called InstantMeshes, although in the future, for organic shapes I will use MakeLive as the software I used ended up making more work for myself. Nevertheless, I was able to create a new low-poly mesh for my model, before importing a ‘medium-poly’ model of roughly 1 million polys to use for the baking process.

      I had some trouble with caging my mesh, but I was able to fix the issue by moving some of the points around so that my cage mesh completely encapsulated the ‘medium-poly’ mesh.