I’m looking to build a small city with a grid of streets/avenues and buildings in between (picture New York circa 1850). Is it better to use a terrain (I want the streets/avenues to be a little sunk down from the rest of the city - as it is in real life) or could I put this all together using planes?
The buildings will be accessed by characters walking off the street too. Would the streets/avenues have to be a different terrain object from the areas that contain the buildings?
Big thanks in advance of any help offered (and yes I am very new to Unity).
Terrains are very, very slow compared to plans. And while you could use them to get some basic shaping done (Like having the road lower than the sidewalk), it would be much better to just model the roads and sidewalks in another program. Assuming you’re still in the conceptual stage of development, I think you should just use planes for the roads and streets until you can get some models in.
So say I was to model streets and place buildings (the buildings need to be separate objects) next to them, would you have some sort of empty object or plane stretched out underneath everything in order to create a base layer to keep everything ‘connected’ or would that just be a waste? Also, is there a good way to take a group of models (street, parks, etc) and combine them into one object? By that I mean, if I had different street models all in independent of each other would that create problems when moving units across various models (moving a unit around the city for example)?
Thanks again for the help, always appreciated.
First of all, Unity allows you to snap things by their vertices. (Hold Ctrl + V, select a vertice, and drag) which will make placing and connecting everything super easy. You don’t need a base layer beneath them at all. The streets and buildings will be fine by themselves.
As far as grouping goes, there are plenty ways to do it. But the easiest, would be to create a blank gameobject and name it something like “Carol St.”. Then, select all the street segments that you want to be grouped together, and drag them into that blank gameobject. This will make them all children of that gameobject, and when you move it, it will move all of it’s children.
I hope this helps, at least a little bit.
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Grouping by city blocks, that’s a great idea. Thanks again.