Hello Unity Development Team!
I am looking for some features for Unity’s terrain tree painting feature and I am not sure if these might be hard to achieve or already exist.
#1 Drag and drop support for adding new Trees. As you can see on the top, I have to add a lot of single prefabs into the tree painter library and depending on our current levels, we may have a lot more to add. Just a simple drag an drop from the project folder into the “Trees” frame would speed up work a lot. It would even get better just to drag a folder with prefabs to it and the terrain would add all prefabs that are in this folder into the list.
#2 Saving these added prefabs to a library list. We have a lot of sub-levels and within I need to remember/list all prefabs and adding them to each new terrain over and over again. It would be a lot easier if we could save all to a library file which I could load into another terrain and use it out of the box.
#3 Height-offsets or mesh-render recognition: Once we have the terrain, we keep it simple but adding a lot of custom prefab rocks by hand. The problem with adding any tree now is that some bushes of course just get added to the height-map terrain but having no way to add then at the same height like some cliff-prefab that is sitting a little above the terrain. Some Y-offset function would save the day!!! Even better if the painter would recognize meshes that are on the terrain and stick the painted prefab on top of these meshes (while of course being connected to the terrain)
#4 Enhanced rotation: Not all Trees are growing straight or are looking into the sky perfectly. It would be awesome to set some slight XZ rotation for getting trees painted a little bit more realistic.
#5 Painted Tree/Prefab interaction: Sometimes I need to rotate or move a bush/tree just a little bit but actually can’t select and move the instanced and painted asset. I actually have to delete it with the delete brush and re-paint it…“which is a pain in the rocks”…
#6 Convert placed prefabs to terrain paint data: Yes it sounds strange but for me it’s faster and easier to place all trees and bushes by my own since the scenes are not big. It’s an artistic move and I need to have full control over each tree and bushes place, scale and rotation for the perfect style and look per tree/bush. It would be a perfect world if I could just place my prefab-instances like I want in the scene and after that (as long as the original prefabs are also listed in the terrain paint asset list) convert/move these into the terrains paint tree data, keeping all custom position rotation and scale.
#7 Paint along normals + random rotation features: I have a lot of small rocks and stones to paint on the terrain. Sadly…very sadly I just can’t a) paint these along the normals of the terrain and b) adding some random rotation on these pebbles, rocks and stones.
#9 Multiple selection & painting: Is there really no way to select more than one tiny rock in the list to paint randomly a bunch of different rocks and stones or even trees? I am wondering if I missed a secret button and would love to know if its possible to use this very basic placement function already.
Thank you for reading. All of these points are things that would speed up my work as Worldbuilder a lot.
Kind regards,
Tobias