Plains
Plains environment recreated between Blender and Unity
Gallery
Blender Renders
For the Blender approach, I used foliage cards with hand-painted grass textures. Up close you can definitely see the cards and geometry, but I really like how Cycles handled the transparency.
Unity Renders
For Unity, I implemented a geometry shader based on the tutorial by Roystan. Definitely a more thorough approach that doesn’t give itself away as easily, but also more complex to implement and modify.
Breakdown
The best solution is definitely a combination of both methods. My next goal is to make the geometry shader more flexible, and load in textures on the geometry rather than draw solid color.