I have a terrain that is way way too large. The artist was new to Unity and stayed with the default terrain size.
We are only using about 1/6 of this terrain.
Is there a way to reduce the size of the terrain without affecting the current terrain objects? (trees, detail objects, etc…)
You can go to Terrain/ Set Resolution and change the terrain size. The only thing you will need to compensate for is that your objects will all be closer to each other by the factor you shrunk the terrain by. ex. if 2 trees are 6 meters apart and you make the terrain 1/6 the size, the trees will be only 1 meter apart. You can also change the resolutions of hightmap and texture and detail maps to scale, but that will flatten your terrain and remove your detail meshes and trees.
I don’t know if that helps, but I hope it does. At least you can save the heightmap if not the trees and details.
Thanks for trying to help.
Unfortunately, the challenge I’m having is that I need to keep the exact layout of the terrain that we have now.
We have a ton of detail objects that have had invisible game object primitives aligned with them to act as colliders.
We also have paths.
in that case you can’t do anything other than having a visual blocker there that prevents the rest of the terrain to be visible to the player (like the clip plane shader)
If you exported the height map and cropped what you want to keep…
perhaps if you then made a new terrain and put the new height map on and put it back in the same place that would work… unless you are directly accessing the mesh data?
you can not access terrain mesh data, there is no terrain mesh.
It would be possible to make a script that transfered part of one terrain with heightmap, detail placements, splat maps and tree positions (a cropped portion) to a new terrain with the right size. It’s a little undocumented, the terrain api, but I know for a fact that all the info needed to do the procedure is awailable in the terrainData object.
So my method could work then?
The heightmap isn’t that big of a problem.
The problem mainly lies in the trees and detail objects. Many elements have been aligned with detail objects.
As for writing a script to gather all of the data and replace it correctly on a terrain with different dimensions… umm… I’m not sure we can spare the time.
For now I’m taking this as a lesson learned.
Next time I need to be more clear with the guidelines of what will be needed with the terrain before asking the art to be made.
No, because the terrain is a lot more than just heights. It’s arays after arrays of detail placement, and splatmap placement, as well as tree positions with scaling info and color tint info. So it’s more than just cropping the heightmap.
If you gave me an idea of how to start exporting the data, I’ll give it a try…
Is such feature available in 2021?
Kinda lame you can’t do this yet. It’s fairly frequently you have a vision, start building and find yourself with too little or too much room for how things unfolded no matter how much planning you do. Can’t really see why a terrain crop would be so difficult to implement. The one caveat to this might be the idiotic multiple of 2 rule for terrain sizes…another wtf. I find Unity is still lacking in so many workflow areas.
The Terrain Toolbox has a “Split” feature (under Terrain Utilities/Terrain Edit/Split) that will carve terrain into a number of smaller terrains.
I know chunking was added but I can’t find any mention if a split option/function. What/where exactly is it? No mention of such a thing in the manual either.
Did more digging, kinda looks like this isn’t available unless your in 2021. Docs are a tad misleading and inaccurate though. Found a how to add it from packages for 2020 but when you click on the instructions it takes you to 2021 details and menu items/terms don’t match. Searching the packages also yields nothing even just for “terrain.”
As a side note the dude asking if it’s possible in 2021 I wasn’t sure if he meant the build or the year heh.
It’s available in 2019.1 and later versions as the docs say. It’s a preview package, so you’ll need to enable preview packages before it’ll show up. Then you can install it normally.
Found that addon but man it adds a lot of functionality but in some really terrible ways. Hey you can do all this stuff but all the key commands you’re used to have been randomly changed and other bizarre things like unit changes and imposed limits drastically lower than normal…because unit changes! heh Just can win with Unity.