Landscape Builder - Procedural Terrains, Advanced Prefab System, spline tool, and more

sstrong · February 24, 2016, 7:43am

Landscape Builder 2 is a professional editor extension for Unity 2018.4, 2019, and 2020 for creating realistic, detailed and consistent landscapes. Blending procedural algorithms with hand-crafted user control, Landscape Builder allows you to create entire worlds tailored for your game requirements with ease.

Designed from the ground up to work seamlessly with multiple Unity terrains, Landscape Builder allows you to create and control every aspect of your landscapes: Topography, texturing, trees, grass and object placement, as well as the must-haves such as lighting and water. Simple to use yet powerful, Landscape Builder is the ultimate landscape design and creation tool for any game developer in Unity: Artist or programmer, hobbyist or professional, beginner or veteran.

Topography: Get the best of both worlds with Landscape Builder’s topography layers system that combines procedural generation techniques with precise manual control. Noise layers allow you to generate topography features procedurally, with numerous presets included to get you started as quickly and easily as possible. This is combined with the image modifier layer (new for version 2.0) which allows you to place terrain features directly into your landscape exactly where you want them, as well as numerous other layer types to suit more specific game needs such as rivers. Coupled with the ability to natively import real-world heightmap data as well as heightmap data from existing Unity terrains, Landscape Builder provides the flexibility to create topography of any shape or form.

Texturing, Trees and Grass: Texture your terrains and populate them with trees and grass procedurally with simple, intuitive rules and workflow. Also included is support for importing texture, tree and grass data from existing Unity terrains.

Object Placement: Populate your landscape with the groups system (new for version 2.0) which allows you to place objects around your landscape in a natural and intuitive manner. Making use of a modular design, the groups system makes it easy to fill your landscapes with whatever objects you like. The group designer allows you to create the rules for your object placement visually in the Unity scene window, in a truly artist-friendly workflow. Programmers are not left out either, with fields in the editor able to produce exactly the same results as the group designer.

Stencils: Paint regions directly onto your landscape with stencils to control what appears where in your landscape. Stencils can be used to control topography, texturing, trees, grass and object placement.

Extras: Set up the atmosphere and time of day with ease with Landscape Builder’s built-in lighting editor, generate normal-map and height-map textures for your albedo-maps, generate runtime scripts directly from the editor, use the weather image effects included to speed up your game development, and much more. Landscape Builder is just full of extra components designed to solve common game design problems frequently faced when designing and creating game worlds.

Integration: Freely integrate with a number of high quality asset store products. Support for EasyRoads3D, Relief Terrain Pack, AQUAS Water Set, Calm Water, River Auto Material (R.A.M.), HQ Photographic Textures, Rustic Grass, Vegetation Studio, MicroSplat, and MegaSplat.

Ease of use: Enjoy a simple and uncluttered workflow, complete with artist-friendly in-scene design editors for features requiring a visual approach. With tooltips for all variables, a detailed manual and in-depth video tutorials, as well as developer support as standard, Landscape Builder leaves you free to spend your time actually making your game instead of trying to decipher complicated user interfaces and vague variable names. If that isn’t enough, you can even join our beta program to test the latest versions of our codebase and suggest new features for future versions.

Above all, Landscape Builder just works.

Includes support for Unity 2018.4.3+, Unity 2019.x, and 2020.1.

Day / Night Transitioning in LB (don’t forget to change YouTube Settings to 720p HD)

Landscape Builder includes:

Access to the LB Beta Program (message us with your Unity invoice number to get access)

Import Real-world heightmap data with native GeoTIFF support.

sstrong · February 24, 2016, 8:17am

Create a landscape is less than 5 minutes

Combine with some other assets to make something more detailed

Here are some examples of Landscape Builder and AQUAS integration

boysenberry · February 24, 2016, 6:10pm

Where do I check it out at?

sstrong · February 24, 2016, 11:41pm

You can find Landscape Builder on the Asset Store here

Shockpuppet · February 25, 2016, 1:24pm

Seems to have a fantastic feature set.

If there was an possibility or example of generating a landscape during run time, such as a game map created by a player using a gui, it would be perfect for many applications.

magique · February 26, 2016, 7:14pm

Looks promising. I’m a Gaia user so when I saw this I was naturally curious. How would you say your asset distinguishes you from Gaia? I would say this is a direct competitor so it’s important to know what might set yours above Gaia and what features you may have planned down the road. Tools like this could also be used alongside Gaia so I always like to see what others have to offer because adding to my bag of tricks can always save time.

Polaraul · February 27, 2016, 11:02am

Gaia seems to be becoming the de facto standard for terrain creation, but competition is always good and Landscape Builder looks as though it could become a strong contender. There are several things I like about this product. The interface is concise and simple yet still allows a fine degree of control. I also like the fact that there is a day night cycle built into the product. Things that would be nice to have at this iteration of the product would be screen capture (similar to how Gaia does this) and a free cam option. These may also help to spread the word. Hope to be able to give the product a more in depth test soon, but well done on the first release.

Polaraul · February 27, 2016, 1:32pm

Artefacts Issue

I am following the tutorial video, but on every landscape I generate there are artefacts as seen in the image below.

unicat · February 27, 2016, 6:03pm

Same here.

Dave_2000 · February 28, 2016, 5:28am

These artefacts are caused by the rain erosion. This is by design; on some terrains this is desirable as it gives the impression of rain runoff e.g. a terrain with steep cliffs. To get rid of these artefacts make sure to only use the “None” or “Stream” erosion options (in the topography tab).

Dave_2000 · February 28, 2016, 6:04am

There are a quite a few differences between Landscape Builder and Gaia:

Topography generation:

Landscape Builder generates topography primarily using procedural algorithms, whereas Gaia (as far as I can tell) uses a “stamping” system, where you can scale, rotate and position height map images to apply to the terrain. The main idea behind Gaia is that you can choose where each feature is placed. The disadvantage of this is that you need to have all the images of features you want to place on your terrain in your project; and if you’re not an artist and/or don’t have easy access to height map data on the internet it can be extremely hard to make new ones that look good. Basically you’re stuck with what is provided in the package (although, as far as I can tell, there are a large amount of images provided). Landscape Builder, however, procedurally generates the entire landscape, giving you full control over the characteristics of your landscape and essentially allowing you to create an infinite variety of landscapes, each slightly different. Not only this, if you tweak the values enough you can create completely new and unique topography features that no one else has ever made before.

We also provide a “curve-based” noise option, which enables you to modify the output of the noise on not only an overall basis but a per octave basis as well. This essentially gives you full control over the noise function (and through this, the topography). This can be a bit hard to get you head around at first but we’ve provided a huge number of presets (more than 15, if I recall correctly) and what all of these presets does is explained in the documentation.

Texturing, Tree and Grass Population:

I haven’t used Gaia, so correct me if I’m on wrong on this, but I believe that Gaia stores all of its texturing, tree and grass population in a resources file. In Landscape Builder, the generation of a landscape is designed to be as quick, easy and flowing as possible. In this way, the texturing, grass and tree population tabs are located in the Landscape Builder window, in the order that you’d usually use them in. This makes the whole process feel intuitive, as one process leads into another.

Modifiers:

As I said before, Landscape Builder’s topography generation doesn’t give you precise control over what feature goes where in your landscape. However, we have another tab called the modifiers tab that allows you to modify your landscape using certain tools. Using these tools you can blend two or more topographies together in areas of your landscape, add topography features defined by an image or even add craters into your landscape!

Extra Features:

Landscape Builder comes with a number of useful extra features built-in. The first of these is the normal-map generator. This allows you to generate a basic normal map from a reference texture. This is how the normal maps in the package were generated, and I find the normal maps help to reduce that flat feel you can often get from a terrain.

We also include a lighting system in the package. This makes it easy to quickly set up some good-looking static/dynamic lighting in your scene, and the dynamic lighting has a working day/night cycle.

Finally, we include a camera animator script in the package. This allows you to quickly and easily define a splined path for cameras, then animate any of your cameras in the scene along this path at runtime.

Dave_2000 · February 28, 2016, 6:08am

Screen capture - now on our roadmap for version 1.1, which should be out soon.

“…and a free cam option.” What did you have in mind for this?

sstrong · February 28, 2016, 6:17am

Thanks for your kind words. We have runtime on our roadmap but don’t have a release date for that feature at the moment. We are also working on a feature that takes an image (or map) and applies that to a topography. An example might be a path or stream or maybe a forest. We’re hoping the first iteration of this feature will make it into v1.1.

In theory, you could generate landscapes at runtime now using our product, but we’re not advertised it since we don’t think it is particularly intuitive in its present form.

unicat · February 28, 2016, 6:27am

Ah, ok. Thank you.

magique · February 28, 2016, 6:41am

Thanks for all the information. It was very helpful. Do you have specific features planned for future versions that might be of interest?

sstrong · February 28, 2016, 7:31am

We’ve added two new tutorials - Texturing and Topography (Part 1). You can see them here

sstrong · February 28, 2016, 8:24am

Roadmap

Topography masking
Modify topography with “map” images
Quick setup option with preset topographies (add default texture setup)
Apply noise to grass, tree and/or texture placement option
Allow meshes to remove grass
Enhance modifiers to inscribe features into topography without losing details
Screen capture from Editor
Natural camera animation
Create a landscape for runtime build
Cloud generation and weather system
Night sky

Our current roadmap isn’t in any particular order at the moment because we’re monitoring user feedback to prioritize features. We’re hoping this forum will help drive Landscape Builder features rather than simply relying on us to give you what we think you want.

Polaraul · February 28, 2016, 11:06am

Although the preset idea is good (and the simplicity of this method is what drew me to this product) I would say it needs some refining for producing usable landscapes.

Dave_2000 · February 28, 2016, 11:26am

Which presets (and any settings you changed) are you using? Also, some landscapes can look a little strange with no texturing, or viewing from far away (some landscape presets aren’t suited to this).

Your first image looks like it would definitely benefit greatly from some texturing. Probably same with the second image, but you’d probably need to tweak a few values. I’d suggesting lowering the gain slightly (or possibly the lacunarity). The third and fourth images, I’m guessing you’re using the rain/combined erosion setting, which isn’t ideally suited to every landscape. If you do want them, however, you can try increasing the noise octaves. This will decrease the size of the rain erosion rivulets, as they are only applied to the last 2 octaves of the noise.

If you post your topography settings, we can take a look at it if you like.

magique · February 28, 2016, 1:58pm

Excellent. Sounds like you have some great features in store. Having a cloud and weather system added would be big.