Ideas for creating large terrains?

Unity Engine
1

Hello,

My team at Xtreme Games has been working with unity for a while now.We are currently at the stage of creating terrain.We under stand how to make terrain and are pretty good at it.The only problem we are having is creating large terrains.Its not the size part its the size plus detail that is killing us.

Our game is about logging and there are many miles of logging roads(lowered to scale of course)and forest to be cut so using a hight map was a suggestion in our meeting Monday but it seems that making a hight map to cover the hole area we are working with is a very problematic task,and free handing the terrain in unity is really hard making realistic looking mountains with gully’s and erosion.

Could someone enlighten our situation?

Thanks,
Lead Developer,
Tyler Ridings

2

We have made a single terrain that is 2000 x 2000 world units (meters) that is based on the USGS seamless DEMs, that provide right around 1 m/pixel of resolution. Performance at this size is good if you carefully adjust all of the available settings such as tree distance, etc., for various quality levels.

To have a larger total landscape, you’ll want to create separate terrain tiles and then move between them using the set neighbors functions, rather than trying to manage the entire world in one single terrain.

3

Hello,

Thanks for the reply but like i said its not a problem of size im having its the problem of having such a large size and still trying to keep it at decent detail.Like this image http://wolfquest.org/images/screen_shot44.jpg if you look in the background you can see you have a pretty nice little hill.Did you all use hight maps?Or free hand in unity?

4

There is a trick there: The distant hills are rendered into the skybox and are not in-game. We used a larger area of the DEM to create a heightmap for Terragen 2, which was used to render the skybox. That was also about 2m/pixel (really the max of the DEM data). Then the in-game terrain was color balanced to match the skybox, and the fog intensity and color set to help blend to the skybox for a given camera draw distance.

I’m actually pretty tickled you couldn’t tell the difference – that was the goal!

Our in-game terrain is 2km x 2km made from a 1024x1024 heightmap (so actually 2m/pixel). The version you’re looking at uses a Unity 2.6 -style 1024 lightmap, and the splat and detail resolution is also 1024.

5

I see.Well i give you credit.It blended with the terrain nicely.