Terrain system irrelevant

My question stems from a question I posed, which was answered (very well) by Fattie. Here is the 1. I wish to delve a bit deeper into a specific part of Fatties answer which was: “… making a huge-world title as you describe then unity’s built-in terrain system would be totally irrelevant, I think.”

So my question is what makes it irrelevant? Does it overexert my CPU/GFX-card too much? What would I use instead of this to make terrain? Blender springs to mind, but what is rather handy about the Unity in-built terrain is that it comes with a number of useful functions.

My workflow:

  • Create terrain
  • Blend terrains using Stitchscape
  • Convert to mesh using T4M
  • Place trees and objects with T4M
  • Simplify mesh using Cruncher
  • Apply my impostor system to the T4M trees (I don’t use T4M LOD etc, it’s pretty slow compared to what you can produce)

(I’m useless with modelling packages!)