Terrain tiling questions

Unity Engine
1

Brought this over from questions, I should have posted here in the first place;

  1. Do the tiles HAVE to be square? Can they be rectangular?

  2. Do tiles have to be the same size? Can I use smaller tiles (512m)in densely populated areas then switch tile size to 2048m in open or desert type areas?

  3. I am assuming the size of the tiles will affect draw calls and loading time?

  4. Is there a good tutorial that explains how to build a large terrain in Unity using tiling?

Thanks for any input

2

  1. You can stretch them out to be rectangular, but the heightmap has to be square, so kind of but not really.

  2. They don’t have to be the same size, but the edges won’t match up properly. The LOD takes care of it pretty much anyway (large flat areas use few polygons) so I don’t think it’s really worth trying to use different sizes.

  3. Yes, but you can increase the pixel error which speeds things up.

–Eric

3

Nearly any game now is using 512x512 resolution textures for landscape terrain so i’d stick to that size you can’t go wrong with it.

4

Generally power of 2 works best, but I think Unity allows any shape and resolution.

5

Thanks for all of the input.
All of the OSM data that I have is in rectangular patches based on Long/Lat. I guess I’ll need to find a calculation to find LONG/LAT coordinates based on square meters. The tiles are for the most part completely unique and MUST match up (city streets,etc).

Anyone that has a handle on such an equation please feel free to enlighten me.

Thanks again