Am I missing something in the Terrain Editor

Unity Engine
1

So, I’ve been watching a few youtube videos on the new Terrain features. They look great.

I downloaded the latest Unity Beta to try it out, however, I don’t see the same features.

Specifically, the erosion, sculpt etc… I see

Raise Lower Terrain
Paint Texture
Set Height
Smooth Height
Stamp Terrain

In the youtube videos, people are testing out new features I don’t seem to have access to… any thoughts?

2

I think this is still in preview. It will be released in 2019.2/3.

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3

Hmm. These seem to be the sculpting tools (which is interesting - thanks for the link) Would you know if the new brushes are included(if not, where they can be found?) and if they can be used to paint plants/prefabs, as well as sculpt terrain? :slight_smile:

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4

lol, that’s actually an exciting idea. I created my own prefab spawner some time ago, but never thought of using the Unity built-in Terrain Tools for that. Gotta consider a refactoring after one of the Unity devs comments on your question :smile: The painting of terrain is no different than the painting of prefabs, it’s just some algorithm (eg poisson distribution) that places gameobjects instead of pixels. Could definitely work.

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My thinking was that maybe it would be a way to paint variety - eg a range of trees varying with height and size, perhaps controlled by the new ‘jitter’ option alongside the regular brush options.

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@Rowlan If you make it how about I take 10% for the idea :wink:

In all seriousness - whoever makes it (if it can’t be done already) - I can see it being a really cool tool - plus the new brushes are meant to be incorporated in the shortcut manager. So a great way to paint foliage - i.e. working in the scene view, rather than the inspector… … Of course a floating asset library manager (easy to select foliage and also keep them close to the scene view) would be handy as well - shall I go on? lol.

Oh yeh - make sure you can also use it to paint prefabs upon prefabs - sooooo many things (I’m not sure when PolyBrush will be finished - dev’ on that seems to be going on as long as HDRP - maybe linked to that, but not sure why)

PS - Can you make this new tool with all the features in my head by next week? :smiley:

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You can even get a 100% … of FREE :smile:

I just checked the detail painter. It lacks several things unfortunately. So anything one does in that regard might be a waste of time unless Unity discloses what they’re up to. Most notably:

  • the detail painter isn’t pluggable like the terrain painter is; it’s just 2 hard-wired menu items for trees and details
  • the prefab editor is circumstantial (separate popup for configuration) and you can only vary a limited range of settings
  • the brushes are mixed up in the palette, no categories. for prefab painting you’d want dedicated brushes (mostly circular with falloff) whereas for terrain you’d want stamps, shapes and such
  • prefab painting alone doesn’t cut it. more preferred would be something that Unity itself lacks in general: a spline editor. instead of placing objects, often it’s much nicer to have objects distributed along a spline and be able to move that spline; that way you could also create more complex things like fences
  • …

Things like that. Either way, I’m really looking forward to the next iteration of what Unity releases regarding the terrain tools, what they presented looked very promising and useful. eg in the video above you see noise. That could definitely be used to determine the prefab distribution.

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8

These are not available yet but we are hoping to get them out soon. The link to the TerrainToolSamples repo posted above is for the 2018.3 brush samples we made last year and will stay on our Github in case folks using 2018.3 need them as reference. The tools shown in the video above will be in a new package available via Package Manager and targeting Unity 2019.1 and up. A vast majority of the tools in the initial release for this package will be height sculpting tools.

We are looking into improving workflows for painting variations of details and decorators on Terrain for future updates to Unity and will include some of the things mentioned above at the time of this post.

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I guess the main question everyone is asking themselves is: When will the first iteration be available for us? :smile:

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These look cool, but if you’re looking for a noise brush and erosion brush right now and don’t want to wait, there’s always “Erosion Brush” on the asset store, and does the texturing also.

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Any update on painted terrain trees that have LODs working with Wind modifiers?

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The tentative date is floating around the end of this month. Hopefully, that stays fixed but we are still trying to line a few things up before we release a preview version of the package

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Apologies for repeating myself here, but it’s still not possible to have trees painted on terrain using the LOD component and be affected by wind, is there a fix coming for this?