Very happy to hear that!
I much prefer that to having a bunch of powerful tools that are completely disconnected from each other and that can’t be customized in any way.
Speaking of this. What kind of flexibility can we expect from the terrain tool?
If I want to create custom layers, or a full node-based graph to output data in the same system, can I do that?
Flexibility and scalability is what differentiates unity from the rest for me, so with unity changing things I really want to see this stay the same.
We definitely want to provide the type of flexibility where users can create custom layers or even replace UI pieces to their liking, such as making a node graph system.
On the authoring side, in the code base, we mostly describe things as “nodes” already so I believe we are on the right track to provide flexibility.
Of course we cannot be absolutely sure we got it right until we start gathering feedback from users like yourself.
Please reach out to @EricDziurzynski to see if it might make sense to join a future alpha or beta program to be able to evaluate it early.
@soleron I understand your concern. What would be really helpful for us if you’d be willing to list what you consider are the “must have” basic features for this new world building tool to be a successful replacement. Then we can make sure we prioritize these in our development.
Hello Kees, now that I noticed you are in this team I am feeling somehow reassured. I remember you from back in the 3dsmax forums and know how creative and artist oriented you are.
I can’t say right out of the bat. And chances are some that I would mention are already there. But I would love to take the terrain tools for a spin and provide more specific feedback.
We’ve just released the Roadmap talk that goes into some more detail about the future of Worldbuilding (worldbuilding specifically starts ~42mins into the talk)
It’s exciting to learn about about all these updates! I’m particularly curious about the virtual texturing system for the layered terrain materials. Does this leverage the existing streaming virtual texturing implementation or is it orthogonal? Is real-time texture compression supported in the new VT system? and are there any updates to the former SVT system?
I don’t think we’ll get it to be infinite size for the first release. There will be a practical size limit (the limit is hard to say right now and will depend also on platform).
I’d love to get to a place where everything in Unity (terrain, physics, lighting, animation) can scale / stream nicely to support really large, almost infinite worlds, but I think that would take multiple releases to all get in place.
I might be biased here, but I really would love Unity to include a non destructive workflow CSG based level editing functionality like realtime-CSG or Chisel.
If the terrain supported arbitrary shaped holes, then you could have CSG shapes punch holes in the terrain. This then would allow you to have buildings with basements, or bunker entrances to underground complexes, and be able to move these around on the terrain together with a patch of terrain. It would make iteration with more complicated scenes so much more pleasant
Thank you all for the feedback and thank you @keesrijnen and @PeterRoe for chiming in and responding as I’ve been juggling many things during Unite and speaking with folks in person. And thank you @PeterRoe for posting the Roadmap Presentation as that has way more details than the keynote! I’ve added that link to the original post.
I’ll be responding more and logging all your insights next Monday when I have more time to dedicate. As always, if you want to log feedback directly to our backlog, you can do so via our updated public roadmap. Over the next 3-6 months we’ll be updating the roadmap more frequently and I’ll plan to give updates quarterly!
Looks great - congrats to the team on the work so far!
As a spoiled user of Microverse, I’ll echo what some others have mentioned here regarding spline integration and hope that we see that sooner than later - the ability to tie it in to rivers, roads, audio … it’s an incredibly powerful way to work, not to mention very artist friendly (which is important when getting buy in).
A couple of questions top of mind:
Will there be built-in tools for baking out terrain to meshes, and things like trees and details to instances?
How will the data be saved? Terrain data assets have always been a bit tricky to deal with in source control.
Is there anything additional you can share re: pulling in content from dcc like Houdini?t
Will hand tweaking the painted tree position/rotation/scale be possible?
I often find myself wanting to move trees around a bit as a final touch to the scene, but it’s not supported in Unity. I really like this QOL in Unreal.
And people are still confused but it was more likely the case that unity 7 would not be guaranteed to released any version next year. It only be hopeful lucky that it will be released as beta in 2025. It seem they try to push it but they can’t promised the date at all
@thaina, @rowlan, this new system is not currently slated to land within the generational release of Unity 6.0-6.1, etc. And we can’t currently comment on exactly when we will be able to give you hands on access yet as many things are moving fast.
I originally hoped we wouldn’t reveal any of this until we had a fixed release schedule but I promise I will be providing quarterly updates and as soon as we can commit to a release schedule, I will post that here.
@jiraphatK , no this will still sadly be an issue in our initial release. Manually adjusting trees and large scattered objects is high priority on the backlog and I may need to add this to the longer term roadmap to get a better sense of the exact needs.
