I am less than one week old in Unity but I start to feel the pain of terrain modeling. The built-in terrain modeler is far from being satisfying. In fact, I don’t like it at all. I downloaded Terrain Toolkit and, despite a small improvement, it is still not sufficient to create quickly a decent realistic terrain.
So I would like to share with those of you who have the same feeling, 2 applications I have been using for years:
1/ World Machine. This application will help you to create real terrain meshes. It is a procedural world generator, to my humble opinion, after more than 5 years in landscape rendering as hobby, it is simply the best. The number of options are incredible, there are combiners, filters, clamping terrain, erosion… All is here to generate something realistic, with good level of macro and micro details. Oh ! And I forgot: it is fast, very fast and it is easy, very easy to learn.
2/ Terragen and especially Terragen 2. Once your terrain has been generated, this could be cool to texture it with a correct tool. This part of the workflow is still to be validated, but terrain generated in Terragen 2 can be imported in Maya or 3ds Max. So, I guess something can be done with Unity.
Just wanted to share that with you. Maybe it was already mentioned in that forum. I will investigate the way to bring Terragen 2 render in Unity but I already created my own skyboxes !
I’d second World Machine as being one of (if not the) best heightmap generators. Using a combination of the Layout Generator node to block in areas with polygons and lines, and the various erosion options to break it up, you can quickly make a good-looking terrain with a specific layout.
I’d still suggest importing the resulting heightmap into an actual Unity terrain instead of meshes, though, even if it’s just to take advantage of the various features of Unity’s terrain such as vegetation and texture painting, plus the built-in LoD options. Of course you’ll still be limited when it comes to things such as overhangs, but I prefer to use models for things like this (and cliff faces/detailed mountains/canyons) placed over the base heightmap.
Regarding the Terrain Toolkit, be sure to get the updated version from Google Code instead of the published one, as it has bug fixes and works better with Unity 3. It’s a great set of scripts, especially if you want to generate terrain in real-time using it’s API inside your app/game, but I usually find myself just using the procedural texturing feature and relying on something like World Machine for actually designing the map.
I used to like Terragen, but haven’t managed to figure out the interface and workflow of the new version yet. It’s incredibly powerful, though.
terragen used to be free right? i agree that the terrain editor is limited. its alright, but could use serious improvements such as those that Makandal mentioned above.
terragen never was free.
only the non commercial was available for free but I guess the missuse rate of it as they didn’t cap the skybox rendering (which is what its most commonly used for) was rather high
I contacted the author of WM a while ago about the possibility of a library-version of it, so you could use it in external applications, but did not receive a reply.
You similar in Unity that would be very similar, with a schematic workflow (Shader Editor, Behave, etc.) and various operators (generators, filters).