Critias Foliage System

UNITY ENGINE: This guide is for the Unity Engine packages and cannot be used as a guide for the Unreal packages.

Overview

The Unity default grass and foliage systems are very old and very limited. In order to create foliage heavy, great-looking and high-performant scenes, we used an alternative foliage rendering system called Critias.

The developer has generously allowed us to use it and include it with Dreamscape Tower and we recommend everyone use it for all their foliage placement.

The demo scene contains >400k separate foliage instances and maintains ~100fps on most modern systems.

Using Critias Painter

The demo scene contains an object called Critias_Painter which stores all the instances that were used to paint the foliage on the terrain.

It works similarly to Unity's tree and detail painter, but it supports custom shaders and LODs.

Adding new foliage is as easy as dragging a new prefab in the painter window.

Detailed instructions on how to use it and what everything does can be found in the included manual.

The manual can be found here: Assets\Polyart\PolyartStudio\SharedResources\CritiasFoliage\Documentation.pdf

External Links

The system is also available completely for free on GitHub: https://github.com/AssemblyJohn/Critias-FoliageSystem