This has got to be one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever done. I don’t have any artistic ability, so that just adds onto it, but the tools provided just don’t really let you do much of anything. I can’t find any addons that make it easier.
There’s no ability to select certain areas, raise/lower the height. They expect you to do everything with a brush? I might be missing something, but this is destroying me ;~;
You can set a height limit, which is pretty much raising and lowering. The most ideal way to make terrains is to import a heightmap and go from there.
Going to promote a product i quite like - terrain composer is a very well featured and intricate tool for editing and organising terrain, even large amounts of it, be sure to have a good look at the tutorials first
Also a widely accepted must-have for terrain work is World Machine http://www.world-machine.com/ its erosion and weathering effects on terrain can create some amazing results, and you can save out your terrains for loading into unity as heightmaps
+1 for World Machine. You can also export as obj.
Unity’s built in terrain tools are adequate for editing existing terrain, but they aren’t very useful for actually building anything from scratch (other than basic scenes).
The terrain itself on the other hand is actually powerful enough for most applications, the problem is getting there. Starting with a heightmap, or a tool that can build them for you like World Machine or WorldComposer is an essential first step.
On top of these it’s also usually worthwhile to do procedural generation to a certain degree for detail placement. You can use TerrainComposer for this, but I also highly recommend digging in and learning about the exposed terrain classes and variables… you can do a LOT by writing your own terrain transformation code… this is certainly not for beginners, but it’s a great learning exercise.
And I’m afraid I must say that building interesting and believable terrain does require artistic ability… the tools are not the only problem. TRAIN YOURSELF!
It’s been quite a while since I started digging / changing and modify Unity as a solution and I believe terrain is one of the worst offenders.
As everyone else has said, WorldMachine is pretty much a must. Then ideally a tree and detail mesh system that doesn’t use Unity’s tree creator or grass as third party foliage tools are quicker and generally look a lot better, shaders you get with Unity are decent but basic. Some parallax mapping goes a long way,
Treat Unity as a blank slate and more people would feel inner peace (I did), the tools provided are something to point you in the right direction and don’t make things look immediately pretty like CryEngine and Unreal do. (Although sometimes I with it would ;)).
I’m going to give a +1 for Terrain Composer. I picked it up awhile back and started playing with it last week. If you couple it with RTP (Relief Terrain Pack) 3, the results can be pretty awesome. It has a steep learning curve though because most of the tutorial videos are behind some of the new changes in the tool but it comes with good documentation and the plugin author was quick to get back to me when I had a question.
ahh yes, worldcomposers very neat for grabbing real life data from actual elevation and satellite data and i’ve much belief in the developer to be adding some very cool things over time
lars’ foilage shaders http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/133398-Advanced-foliage-shader-released are excellent for your plantlife btw, and while i’m suggesting things, if you don’t plump for the incredibly feature rich relief terrain package for shading your terrains http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/206516-Relief-Terrain-Pack-(RTP)-v3-on-AssetStore you can plump for a very interesting open source project, again by lars, for physically based shading for your materials, terrain and vegetation http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/221985-Lux-�-an-open-source-physically-based-shading-framework, taking you from getting arsey at unity’s very much limited terrain tools to having a great set of 3rd party tools. I can vouch it was money well spent (although lux is free! and welcome to contributors, and i havent tried it, but its a really great initiative)
ShadowK: I do understand your feeling regarding unity’s OOMPH with technical graphics wizardry but, while not absolutely ideal implemntations (being 3rd party and subject to sudden dev disinterest), theres some absolutely cracking stuff in the asset store (and on forums for free), i’ve certainly had Unity doing a lot of things i never really imagined it would do and the future just keeps getting brighter.
Do you know any free or cheap (~$20) tools like this? I’m not ready to pay $100 for terrain editor.
Seriously? I am, im still very much hobbying for now, although hopefully not forever, and i still recognise the simple equation of cost of product versus cost of employing someone to write the product
If i can get the money for some asset that really shines, and i have a good few already, including much said above, its been absolutely worth it. If you can’t be prepared to fork out over the development of a game (even indie projects are expected to cost several thousand pounds/dollars upwards to create) then i cant help but imagine you’ll may not get far
I’ve got it to the stage now where me and a group of testers both agreed that the stuff we are doing in Unity now looks better than Unreal 3… Because we had the option to switch, whilst we have made heavy customisation in regards to many things I’ve also taken advantage of the asset store when possible… Marmoset I used to use back in the day with CryEngine and used it for comparisons, skyshop has been a no brainer and a massive help, we use ATS for splatmaps although we use our own IBL shaders… We use Amplify for adding some colour depth back when using LCS and bloom etc.
We made our own Occlusion tools and every day we are finding less reason to switch to anything else bar a 64-Bit editor, which has been a major pitfall when trying to mimic AAA games.
In essence Unity is a lot of work, it really is… Far, far more than Unreal and CryEngine in terms of graphical prowess, in other area’s it’s far simpler in the high fidelity sector. I’m not keen on the fact you need the asset store to fill some gaps, but on the other hand the asset store provides you with tools no other engine can offer. It’s a case of pick your poison, but now we have integrated a lot of our own stuff I’m actually becoming very impressed with Unity as a whole.
I’ve always said it’s a deceptive engine, easy to learn… Extremely difficult to master.