Sam's Teach Yourself Unity In 24 Hours - Chapter 4 not working at all...

Hi Folks.

I’m teaching myself Unity 3D and am very excited about finally moving into 3D game development after over two decades of 2D work. I’m working from the book, Sam’s Teach Yourself Unity In 24 Hours. It’s written for Unity 4.2 and of course I’m using todays up to date 5. I got through chapters 1, 2 and 3 fine, even working out the differences between Unity 4 and 5. But when I hit chapter 4 which is on terrain building, I hit a brick wall!

I can’t for the life of me get anything in this chapter to work. The first example is to apply a height map to a terrain to great mountains, but when I follow the book and try to do it, I get a very turbulent landscape littered with tiny bumps and I can’t manipulate them at all.

When I try the next example where it guides you in raising the lowering land, painting textures on it, and painting trees on it, I can’t get this to work either, the tools seem to operator sporadically.

It’s frustrating to have my studies stopped to early, chapter 4. I was wondering if anyone here to knows the book, could chip in and offer some advice please?

Today’s up to date is version 2017.3 p1 which is quite a lot further on. Having said this, the terrain didn’t change between 4 and 5 except for the shader which is now physically based ish. But these are common changes between 4 and 5.

Thanks. Sorry, typo, yes I’m running the up to date version. The problem I’m having is, the next chapter, 5 and so on, build on top of the stuff in terrain in chapter 4. I’m sure I can still learn from other parts of the book if I skip over it.

Even if you ignore the height map portion (which you could lookup online), you should be able to use the tools in the editor to raise/lower the terrain and build your own. Last time I used the terrain tools, everything was working well :slight_smile: I’ve never tried to create my own height map, though have seen 1 or 2 videos on the subject .
I hope you get it sorted out and can continue your learning…

I bought that book last year, but I can’t work through it because I don’t have a PC capable of running Unity.

Alternatively you can simply downgrade to an older release of Unity until you’ve finished with the book. Unity offers downloads as far back as Unity 3.x because there are still people working with the older releases (I’m on Unity 5.x).

https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download/archive

Thanks for the feedback. I’m working my way though Terrain with some help from the book, and some online. But I’ve hit an issue… Sometimes when I’m trying to shape the terrain myself, such as raise or lower it, even through I have the blue highlighter on the mouse over the landscape, clicking the button does nothing. And when it does work, it seems to only want to raise the land, I can’t lower it or level it or paint it, etc. Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

Granted, I’m not on the top million for most published games on these forums, but I’ve never bothered with the terrain system. If it were me, I’d read the section but just skip the parts that required you to do anything, so you can get on with the real stuff.

Maybe the terrain system in Unity is better than it used to be, but I remember hearing nothing but bad things about it years ago. Your time is better spent learning actual code stuff and how to use the multitude of other things Unity offers, and just leave terrains behind you.

No. It hasn’t changed at all.

You had to use a modifier key to lower the terrain on the raise/lower tab. I forget if it’s cntrl or shift, but it tells you there if you read inside the tab area :wink:
You cannot lower beyond the “bottom”… :slight_smile:

Thanks, Folks, I’m making progress. Appreciate the help.

Cool, good stuff. :slight_smile: