In the future I’m thinking of building a game that requires seamless huge environments. Such as 1/3 the size of the US. However, how would I place grass, detail meshes, and trees on such a large world? I certainly wouldn’t want to do it by hand.
More ever, how would I specify where certain trees and bushes would grow? Such as woodland trees having a tendency to grow in the crevasses of mountains at lower altitudes. Would I have to build my own tool with scripts to do this? Or is there something that exist already.
I have heard of splatmaps that can be used to paint trees and bushes on terrain like textures. Although it still would be a huge task and for such a huge terrain the texture resolution would have to be at a ridiculous resolution. Making it impossible to work with in photoshop because of lag.
I heard of people using third party terrain building software or modeling programs to build their environments, then getting that into unity. However would all of the grass, bushes and trees they placed in the other program transfer over as grass, detail meshes and trees in Unity?
So what would you recommend for me? Would scripting my own tool to automatically place trees, grass, and bushes be the best way to fill up a huge world? Or even textures for that matter. How hard would it be to do this and what are the obstacles. Given I have about a years worth of programming knowledge.
Could making a massive splatmap for foliage work for something like the size of mexico?
Just looking for more input on this before I do what I think needs to be done, which is to script a terrain editing tool from scratch, that will automatically place trees/grass on a massive world. Has anyone else done this in Unity? I cant imagine manually painting all of the bushes and grass on a continent size terrain. Unless people are actually known to do it, and its a right way.
You could set up a script to place things automatically…based on elevation, hand painted splats etc… You will still want the ability to modify/ change things by hand though.
Really its kinda unrealistic to paint that much terrain by hand…so some automated method is probably the your best shot.