I am still learning cinema 4d ( i am evaluating the demo so i can’t export ), but then i wondered how unity would import my big terrain . How do i need to prepare it ?
Can i use 50 times the same texture ? ( let’s say i have a grass texture of 512x512 ), can i use 50 matierals with this texture in my scene ? would that be fine with unity ?
I was thinking to have a big mesh, with for example, grass, a road and a lake. So many materials would be repeated, but i think i need to set them one by one in order to have them perfectly adjusted to my landscape.
The other alternative would be to have different mesh for each texture type.
you use an alpha texture to control what texture tiles where. there’s links to the other terrain shaders on there as well. i don’t know cinema 4D so someone else will have to answer that - though when you say ‘big’ do you mean 1000m x 1000m or 40,000 polygons?
Theres a few good shaders out there for terrain now, and Unity 2.0 is threatening to unleash new possibilities too. The wiki collection of shaders is a good place to find resources there.
Forget the one mesh for each texture approach, thats not necessary. 50 times the same texture ==tiling the texture, right? No prob there. When you’ve got your mesh imported and a terrain shader of some sort on, you go to the inspector and adjust the tiling by clicking the placement button.
The only other considerations are that Unity will support meshes up to 65000 polygons, though the sweet spot is between 1500 and 4000 polys. And finally make sure your mesh has UV information, ie planar UV projection along the y axis.
Be sure to show off your progress…
Hope that helps-do follow Dj’s link
AC
PS you can get Bryce 5.5 from download.com which is free, which is quite good for exporting terrain meshes IMHO
Just to be sure you are aware of it, there is a cool terrain engine coming up in Unity 2.0. It doesn’t help you now, but depending on your timeframe it may be worth waiting to put off the terrain stuff for now. How long that will be is uncertain, as there hasn’t been a release date announced.
But do you do the texturing in Unity 3d ?
I have to admit, i’m lost, i thought we should do it in the modeling tool ( c4d in my case ).
Do i just need to create my “landscape” in c4d, then add the textures in unity ?
This new terrain engine seems great, maybe i’ll go with that. In fact i bought unity recently because i noticed the free upgrade to 2.0 , that was a good incentive.
My terrain will be around 500 meters x 500 meters btw. I think i need a “preparing a 3d scene for 3d games for newbies” tutorial
You would do your UV mapping in your external 3D app, then apply the textures within Unity (sometimes that can happen automatically as Unity sometimes reads texture information from the file).
But, you would usually be wanting to use certain materials/shaders on your objects, so you will end up tweaking things in Unity anyway.
I really think you will love the new system for sure, and personally I think it’s well worth it if you wait for 2.0 and spend some time learning about different aspects of Unity in the mean time. If you are in a rush for a project, I am sure there is still something else you can work on in the mean time.
Searching around here can help a lot (most times google searches the forums better than the built-in search). And that’s also why we are here to help.
To create terrains with Unity 2.0 will be a lot easier than it is atm.
If you want to try it now with 1.6 I recommend to cut your big terrain into pieces of around 4000-8000 polygons (triangles). Than the physics engine can handle the terrain mesh faster.
I personally would wait until you get a copy of 2.0 to create the terrain. I guess you also have to do/test other things for your game. Maybe it’s a good idea to get more familiar with Unity first, create some test scenes and then, when Unity 2.0 was released, start with the terrain.
Ok, i think i’ll wait for unity 2, and continue my investigations in learning the engine.
Since i need to learn c4d too, i guess my game won’t be started before november
