I have a lot of small rocks to place on my 2500 x 2500 terrain and I am looking for a solution on the best way to automate this task, otherwise it will take me several weeks.
Is there a simple solution?
This might help: Scatter Objects with Polybrush - Unity Learn
If you want it fully automated, you could read the height map of the terrain and place the objects via code in some command triggered in edit mode.
There are a lot of terrain tools in the asset store that offers scattering as well if you want a more procedural approach. They cost money though.
Having lots of objects active in a scene can become quite demanding. If possible you should generate nearby rocks as the player moves through the scene and delete them when they go out of viewing range. Although keep in mind that this also can become quite demanding as you may need to do lots of raycasting to make sure the rocks don’t appear in silly places. Nobody wants a rock in their bed!.
Ideally your game would load/stream in manually placed rock objects as the player moved through the world, but this isn’t so easy to do in Unity. This is partly the reason why games like Red Dead Redemption take years to create. All the world data is manually generated.
True, but depends on the polycount. If you mark objects as static (which allows for “batching”) and they only use a few hand full of meshes and materials, Unity can well handle a few thousand of objects and a couple million polygons on midrange computers (Tip: Look at the Rendering Statistics Window for info on that).
Edit:
Oh I had in mind the TO wants 2500 rocks. A 2500m x 2500m map with a rock or other things every couple meters will indeed require “object streaming” (which is what zulo described).
I would NOT recommend approaching a game that requires that, unless you have a lot of experience with at least 2-3 other games before this as there is no simple solution.
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