Since i started using unity (2years) I see nothing change or added to terrain tools, for me it become old. Yes, it working good. But its time to update it.
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I believe a new terrain system is on the roadmap. (under research though, so no idea when we might have it)
I hope your right.
Unity need to upgrade these things.
2 Years ago someone from Unity asked me what I would like see being added to the terrain tools. I told them a better way to seamless paint textures and height from one to another terrain. However 2 years later, I have not seen a single improvement to the current terrain system. Not even a tool to make life easier when dealing with the old terrains. It’s totally left alone and no one is even taking a peek at it.
The new terrain system is on the roadmap since it was even possible to see a roadmap. I have little to no fait to ever see it improve the next 2 years. But I hope I’m wrong.
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I don’t believe we will ever see a new terrain system from unity. There’s been so much time and investment from plugin developers. I don’t think they want to mess that up. They make 30% from terrain tools and sell a lot too.
The plugins are impressive and we have a lot tools available to us. I’m not bothered by tools anymore, they’re on the asset store and are very impressive. however there needs to be an improvement on performance for sure.
Terrain former is a must have.
Gaia is a must have.
TerrainComposer 2 I haven’t used v2 yet… probably will upgrade. the mans a wizard
Relief Terrain Pack v3.3 : Amazing shaders. word on the street is he saved kitten from a burning building whilst making the POM feature.
World Creator Standard
Gaia and terrain former are definitely a must have are are really cheap. Sometimes I mess around with unreal engine and they don’t have anyway near the tools we have available to us here. They have much better tech and performance but not the tools.
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Thank you. Both of us share the same thoughts.
Yes. There are tools available in store could help and their are really good. But, why ? I’m not talking about something big. These tools have been not update it for long long time ! Like, Unity develops forget it.
Look at this…Photoshop Tools before 20y and now. Do you see any differences ?
NO. They using the same tools till now. the different is they adds new features for every tool.
Look where men stands…Can you make like this cliff with unity ?
I don’t think so. I hope you understand my point.
Actually, that would need to be an entire new system because the only way to do this is with a voxel based terrain system.
But I understand your point, there are a lots of simple things that they could add to the old system, for example, ability to add new brush alphas, increase the old brush alpha resolutions (if you increase the size of brush you will see that the alpha gets messed up), hold a button to smooth the terrain whatever tool you are, place (and scatter) multiple detail objects/grass at once.
I believe terrain former has most of these features but still, it’s something that imho should be native. I think unity has the same terrain tools that they had when it was released and this is very bad, c’mon UT, you don’t need to deliver an entire new terrain system, just add small new features to the current one as we go!
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Take a look at Witcher 3 or any other AAA game, such cliff terrain parts are made with 3D models.
Voxel terrain is slwoer than non voxel terrain.
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Is it? it’s just mesh at the end of the day. The idea that it would be slower would depend on a lot of factors. I think the “slower” part probably has something to do with everyone demanding PBS triplanar with 4 splats…
You still don’t have a tool that would allow to edit mesh insert anyway 
True, I forgot that method, the downside of this is that you need lots of different cliff models, but it’s still a good idea, in Skyrim I also remember seeing this being done but with lower cliffs.
MapMagic Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making …also looks pretty decent
yeh unity terrain tools suck… not even built in support for terrain hole cutting.
“Voxel terrain is slwoer than non voxel terrain”
Even if it can be slower in generation or as hippo mentions the shaders used on it… the flexibility and control over shapes overhang cliffs, caves etc… makes for much better game worlds… not to mention the other advantageous aspects for your game.
Interestingly enough Unity terrain does allow runtime editing of the height somewhat useful and something that anyone using Unreal will have a battle to achieve as its not exposed to modifying. Explosion craters, paths in snow all with the terrain height being adjusted with decal effect etc
It would be nice to see a real next gen improvement to terrain cough voxels. Then we can move onto haviing to buy better plugins and tools for that instead of heightmap terrain.
But let’s find the culprit first!
What makes voxel terrain slower?
Generally voxel terrain are slower relative to procedural generation, they takes more data because they are naively packed into plain grid for easy access in highly modifiable and interactive terrain, and have stuff like voxel material so you can mine ore like in minecraft… And if you use marching square there is little research on LODing so you take the full cost of the mesh at any distance…
Do a generic voxel terrain need all of that?
- we don’t need height because it’s implicit
- we primarily need difference between air and solid, that 1bit, which mean a 32x32x32 chunk can be store in just a 32² array.
- we need LOD and that’s what Dual contouring is great at
- we can pack data better by having full chunk marked as full (with a 1bit bool) and discard the 32² array and use compression to store.
- Texturing can work the same way that light backing with splat atlas
- You can tessellate and perturbe voxel surface to have extra detail even at low voxel resolution.
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We are phasing out the current terrain system, development work on the old system is restricted to bug fixes only.
The development of a new terrain system is underway. There’s a lot of work to do, so we can’t say when it will be fully ready. Chances are we are going to roll out individual parts of the system gradually. The first component to work on is vegetation. (more details here)
The terrain team is currently focusing on improving the workflow and performance of GPU instancing, which is vital to a vegetation system.
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This is Great news
I would like a dense grass system that’s quite lightweight as a filler option. Generally you just want that noise going on, while placing a few hero pieces here and there.
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I like the player interaction part!
Still there is HOPE. You know what, IF after two years of waiting, the new update for terrain was not good, this will be really bad and will break user hearts.
Good news! 
Good, hope to see some improvements with instancing in order to build a AAA quality terrain with lot of vegetations without dropping performances!