I’m trying to figure out what a realistic terrain size would be. I’ve scaled my character up so that grass and things painted onto the terrain are around the correct size (unless there’s a way to make the grass and other detail smaller, I guess I can’t scale things down the way.) So I go ahead and paint in some mountains and things then proceed to laying a city area. The city is completely out of proportion to the terrain but is properly sized and proportionate to the character. So clearly I have to up-scale the terrain. Right?
So, what is the minimum size of terrain that would best represent a real-world (roughly 2 meter tall character) sized terrain? Currently it’s 2000x2000. I tried increasing this to 10000x10000 and whilst this would potentially work, I’m not sure if it’s wise to keep a single terrain object this size.
The larger a terrain, the less detailed it is, though you can counter-balance that by increasing the heightmap resolution. But only up to a point, since 4097x4097 is the maximum you can have for heightmaps. You may prefer to have multiple terrains instead of making a single terrain larger.
–Eric
A “realistic terrain size” doesn’t really excist 
It depends on very few things:
- How big you need the terrain/world to be
- How finely you want to be able to supply detail to the surface
Example:
I know i want to create a gameworld of roughly 8km by 8km
I want to be able to create height and texture paint detail by each half metre.
This would mean i would have a total terrain resolution of 16000 by 16000
Textures are ideally in a power-of-two size, and one texture’s maximum size is 4096x4096
This would mean to me i would create the terrain out of 4 by 4 pieces of terrain,
each containing one 4096x4096 unit, or 2048x2048 metre piece.
In the end this would give me a 8192x8192 metre terrain.
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