A Few Terrain Engine Questions

[anon_76379815]

Hello Everyone,

I’m new to posting here but I’ve been lurking for the past year or so to find all sorts of great solutions for my Unity questions. Alas, there are a few I couldn’t locate answers to lately, specifically relating to the new (and awesome!) terrain engine. My questions are:

1. Does the terrain engine optimize texture maps that you apply? I assume this does happen in some way.

2)Additionally, I create all my terrain texture maps as a single map outside of unity in Terragen. I have had good luck applying the single textures to a large terrain in Unity by making it’s size the same as the terrain and then giving it a uniform gray lightmap. (I already have shadows applied) Right now my texture maps are 2048x2048 for a 1000 or so meter terrain. Is this a good size for the engine and is it optimizing the texture the same as if i had many splat maps painting on in Unity itself?

3. Is there any way to scale a mesh itself in Unity? The reason I ask is that the tree painting feature reads the mesh directly and there seems to be no way to scale the trees post-import while manually placing a tree on the terrain is obviously an easy way through scaling the entire prefab. This would save me a lot of time as I wouldn’t have to travel back and forth between my 3D app and Unity nearly as much.

Any help is greatly appreciated. This is my project in Unity since the 2.0 features and I’m having a great time so far! Thanks.

• Luke

[Joachim_Ante_1]

1. Does the terrain engine optimize texture maps that you apply? I assume this does happen in some way.

Yes. We use something called splat maps. It gives you really really high resolution, while you have full control over the painting and does texture lod for far away parts of the terrain.

2)Additionally, I create all my terrain texture maps as a single map outside of unity in Terragen. I have had good luck applying the single textures to a large terrain in Unity by making it’s size the same as the terrain and then giving it a uniform gray lightmap. (I already have shadows applied) Right now my texture maps are 2048x2048 for a 1000 or so meter terrain. Is this a good size for the engine and is it optimizing the texture the same as if i had many splat maps painting on in Unity itself?

While thats possible it’s better to use the builtin splat maps. It gives you much higher resolution due to blending of high resolution splatmaps and automatic lodding of textures far away.

3. Is there any way to scale a mesh itself in Unity? The reason I ask is that the tree painting feature reads the mesh directly and there seems to be no way to scale the trees post-import while manually placing a tree on the terrain is obviously an easy way through scaling the entire prefab. This would save me a lot of time as I wouldn’t have to travel back and forth between my 3D app and Unity nearly as much.

You can just use the scale tool. If you want to scale it across all instances, it’s best to modify it in the import settings of the mesh. The terrain engine can also scale trees randomly while painting.

[anon_76379815]

Thank you that’s very useful. I guess i’ll have to use splat maps if I want precise details or maybe I’ll just paint some splat maps on top of my existing texture where detail is needed.