FoliMesh was born in the forests of Alardon
Our tree generator started as an in-house tool for Alardon Online — a huge medieval world with battles of thousands of warriors. Here is why that game needed its own forests.
FoliMesh did not start as a product. It started as a problem inside another game: Alardon Online, the medieval online world our studio is building.
A world that needs a lot of trees
Alardon is one huge world where you decide who to be: a builder who grows a village into a city, a ruler with vassals and laws, a commander, a merchant leading caravans — or a bandit hiding in the hills. Forests are everywhere in that world, and they are not just scenery. Caravans travel along forest roads, bandits wait in the woods, and a commander looks for a tree line to hide a flank attack.
Then come the battles. On PC, Alardon plans for up to 5,000 warriors per side in a single battle — archers, infantry and cavalry on one field, with eight cultures and 380 troop types. Every frame has to draw thousands of soldiers and the forest around them.
Why we built our own generator
Hand-made trees look great until you need hundreds of species variations and every one of them must stay cheap at a distance. Existing tools either gave us beautiful but heavy assets or simple ones without a proper level-of-detail chain.
So we wrote a procedural generator with one rule: every tree is built for a budget. You set a triangle budget for each LOD, and the generator finds the right detail for bark and leaves on its own, keeping the same silhouette from LOD0 to LOD3. Each new seed gives a new tree of the same species, so a forest never repeats.
From one game to every game
Once the forests of Alardon worked, we realised the same problem exists in almost every game with outdoor worlds. That is how FoliMesh became a separate tool: describe a tree in words or move the sliders, and get a game-ready model with LODs and collision for Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, Blender and the web.
Follow Alardon
Alardon Online is in pre-alpha and will be free to play — purchases only for looks and convenience, never for troops, speed or power. It will launch first on PC with its own launcher, then Mac, Steam, browsers and phones. There is no release date yet.
And if your game needs forests too — open the FoliMesh catalog.
