Clipping terrain with a mesh

[hatshapedhat]

I have a terrain in unity, and I want to have a non convex mesh clip that terrain. I created a simple mesh in blender that is basically a box with the top subdivided and pushed in - like a bowl or something.

When I place that mesh in my scene near ground level, the terrain height and textures appear in the middle of my mesh. Is there something I can do to tell Unity to clip the terrain texture to the outer bounds my mesh so that I can see the empty cavity in my mesh, or do I need to lower the height of the terrain in this location so that it doesn’t clip?

Most of the questions I can find have to do with colliders - I’m probably going to wrap the whole mesh in a large collider - this isn’t (currently) about things being able to fall into the cavity, I just want it to look right.

[Owen-Reynolds]

“lower the height of the terrain”. That’s pretty much it.

You can try tricks like drawing the extra bowl mesh later, and ignoring depth. That won’t work – you’d always see all of it, even the parts that should be cut out by the angle. Just no good way to to “mark” the terrain over the bowl.

A (non-Unity) heavy-duty terrain system might have the ability to cut squares out of the terrain (then the object you insert would have a lip, to cover the jagged terrain edges.) You see this in a lot of MMOs for caves. You can always pick out where the mesh and terrain almost smoothly meet.