Hello.
Can anyone suggest to me possibly the most capable terrain editor for Unity? Something that has all the features like triplanar mapping, height blending with many layers, displacement with distance based tesselation, a proper foliage system that looks natural and auto-placed based on splatmaps or slopes.
Basically I’m looking for the best way to create believeable terrains in Unity.
My opinion:
I would say Gaia Pro 2021. It is fairly strong on most of the requirements, obviously stronger on some things than others. If you don’t mind paying for features and you’re looking for absolute the best things, I would think about getting/using Gaia with Vegetation Studio Pro and maybe Microsplat.
Gaia is an excellent terrain editor with a ton of features, including “basic” placement, but VSP is much better at it and offers a ton of useful features if you’re actually making a game, like tree removal, saving states and super-fast job-system-based calculations and instanced indirect drawing. Meanwhile when it comes to texturing, Microsplat is extremely hard to beat by any means. You can get all sorts of extras for it, from tracks to icing, from sand to mesh-terrain blending, everything.
If you want to go even further, you can throw Vegetation Engine in the mix, which is a detailing/vegetation shader system. You can convert a ton of 3rd-party, premade assets, unified workflow for everything, advanced shader features, effects, all kind of cool things.
And if you want all of this super-hyper fast, then you can get Amplify Impostors for the crown onto the top of the already existing cherry on the top. Which allows you to reduce the number of vertices to piece of cake levels saving performance and keeping the visuals.
If you want to start “basic” (everything is relative), then just get Gaia. And, of course, whatever you decide, always research before buy, check if they meet your expectations.
Mapmagic 2! (asset is free, modules that offer extra features are not)
Along with it’s great modules, you can do crazy stuff. It even has an infinite terrain feature.
I usually don’t like nodes, mapmagic is the exception. It’s so much fun using the nodes to create a terrain/world.
And there’s a lot of nodes, you can do crazy stuff with these nodes.
I also really like the look of the terrains it creates.
Using it’s paid modules you can populate vegetation/forests.
There’s also an amazing Brush module, that enables you to use any node (or multiple nodes) on a brush.
The populating modules can add vegetation straight to the terrain, and if you slap a Nature Renderer (asset) component on the terrain, it’ll look great with good performance.
It also has proc texturing and so on. Although you’re probably better off using something like Micro splat for texturing, especially if you want to make custom changes (like paint) on the terrain after mapMagic creates your terrain.
You ask about a terrain editor, but then you list a bunch of terrain rendering features. So is it a terrain renderer you need, or both?
If you do need an Editor then the one which is “best” will depend significantly on your project and its design goals. What kind of terrain do you need to make?
World Creator is the most robust and user friendly terrain creation tool.
For the terrain material Microsplat/Megasplat has you covered.
For vegetation procedural placement there is pretty much one choice - vegetation studio.
The in-editor options like Gaia and Map Magic I think are fine for many needs but as always it is the specifics of your project which matter. I try to look for the most mature software with biggest range of users that can support specialized project needs.