renderning quality on far away objects

hey everyone,

i’ve created a flying game, where you are in a plane, and i have a fairly large terrain.

it also has some trees, and the trees dont’t render as 3d until i get just above them, and it doesn’t look that good when your flying over a tree, and it all of a sudden grows really quickly…
and also, you can’t see much of the terrain, as it generates as you get fairly close to the edge… i was just wondering if there was a way to improve these two things…

thanks

-Grady

If you’re using unity’s built-in terrain, there are LOD options for the terrain:

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/terrain-OtherSettings.html

If the terrain seems to be cut at some fixed distance, the problem is the camera’s far clipping plane - its default value is 1000 m, which is too short for a flying camera. You should set the Far Clipping Plane to the length of your terrain. If your terrain is too large, you may notice that lakes and other objects “buried” in the terrain start to have jittered margins. It’s caused by inaccuracies in the Z (or depth) buffer, and you can solve this by increasing the distance of the Near Clipping Plane (even small changes in this parameter result in great improvement). Finnally, you should adjust some Fog level in the Edit->Render Settings menu to make the terrain vanishes in the distance (you surelly will not want the borders of your terrain to appear). The fog is also useful to reduce the distance of the far clipping plane: if your fog settings limit the view distance to 5000 m, for instance, you can set the far clipping plane to this value, thus reducing Z buffer problems (and improving performance, since there will be less objects to be rendered).