Hi, i’m just wondering how game devs create terrain in games, such as.
Just Cause 2
Planet Calypso
World of Warcraft and many others.
Could amazing and gigantic terrain be made in unity using the basic terrain tools or would you need to create it with a modeler?
Thanks for reading
Not sure I fully understand your question.
You can make terrain of any size with Terragen, Vue probably Picogen in a matter of hours. And there are many other similar tools. But you would also need to skin it using textures, place lakes, rivers, buildings, objects etc. Plus trees/vegetation. For Unity there is automation for roads placing - EasyRoads3D or something - don’t remember exact name but very nice tool. For triple A game, like WoW, each location sure would need different textures and lots of work to finetune details.
And yes, you can import heightmaps and textures into Unity project.
But there is no doubt that in big projects all terrains/levels were done in modeling apps. How beautiful end result would depends on quality of textures used for surface/trees/grass/roads etc. And how detailed are models, how good looking animation used.
Hi, i recently posted a thread and asked how you could create huge and amazing terrains like ones in World Of Warcraft, Just Cause 2 and Planet Calypso and some one said i could use Terragen, i just want to know if terragen could be used in unity and which version can be used to create terrain.
Thanks for reading.
Use the terrain in Unity. Otherwise you get hit with a mesh collider calculation. The terrain collider is much more efficient. BTW, Terragen creates terrain. Every version. All obj or dae or fbx can be imported into Unity so if you do use Terragen just export the terrain as one of those formats.
HTH
BTH
Hi, i’m just wondering if you can make large landscapes in Unity without any or alot of lag, my game idea is a large world and i guess you cant have giant landscapes so i’m planning on spliting it up into districts but my question is can you create a large area in unity?
Thanks for reading.
Yes you can. Just split it and use some LODs and you’re good to go
What is an LOD?
Sorry, looked it up…
.level of detail
=S
Well I don’t know how World of Warcraft or other mmorpgs do it, but I do know how it’s done on Runescape. In the player point of view, it looks like a giant world with huuuuge terrain. But it really isn’t. 
They divide the whole map into 104x104 (i believe) parts called regions, and basically the whole map is never loaded or else it would take ages to load and would kill the gameplay due to super lag, but instead they only load the region in which player is in. When the player is close to the end of that region, it loads up another region/ map part where player is close to etc.
If that’s what you were asking 
For massive landscapes they will page in different terrains. A common practice is to load in a 3x3 grid of terrain objects so that there is a terrain object loaded for every direction the player could go. When he leaves the current terrain, the ones that no longer immediately surround the player are unloaded and new ones are loaded. Also, to create massive terrains you usually want to use a procedural generator to create a base, then hand edit those to get the detail you are looking for (roads, cliffs, etc).
I’ve had a fair amount of luck using World Machine 2 to generate terrains, the pro version will allow you to create tiled terrains so you could output the heightmaps in chunks. Here’s an example of a quick terrain I made using the free version of World machine: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/72568-Terrain-test
In my game, it is all created using seamless 2D images, tiling them, lol