Unity + World Creator 2 + Terrain Cache + HDRP

Unity Engine
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This is looking pretty much perfect, would like to hear from users who already have it. I like the fact it’s an external application with a sync app that allows Unity to update alongside it, but need more info about it such as HDRP support and so on:

  1. What’s the best tile size to use? (for Unity, regardless)
  2. If we use 8 splats, can we have 8 different splats per tile instead of for the whole thing in Unity and WC2?
  3. What about resolution of terrain tile? the bigger the height range, the less precision you have, so would it be an idea to raise or lower that terrain tile to maximise the available height precision?
  4. Will Unity’s terrain cache support 8 splats?
  5. Vegetation with HDRP… what’s the state of affairs?

Thanks all! :slight_smile:

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World Creator became my weapon of choice after having tried every terrain tool available over the past few years. There is plenty to be said there, but I can touch on some of the subjects you’re interested in.

I suppose the best tile size depends on the total size of your terrain and the usual suspect such as target platform, visibility and gameplay. I’ve been using it for an 8x8km terrain, split up into 256 tiles for streaming. Each tile ended up with a heightmap/splatmap resolution of 128px, which is not very high but sufficient for my particular project. The resolution is directly related to the detail per meter you set up in WC, you can freely change this as it’s non-destructive. Though it’s not possible to control the resolution per tile.

As for the splatmaps, these are equal across all tiles. If texture X isn’t visible on tile Y, it’ll still take up a splatmap channel. Not ideal, but also not a trivial issue to circumvent.

I’m using 2018.2 and the standard pipeline, so I’m afraid I can’t offer any experience on those fronts. But seeing as it doesn’t use any graphical features, I believe it should work.

I feel like the sync tool is functionality, but not field tested and polished. One thing you’ll find is that the syncing operation first removes all terrains from your scene, then creates new ones (in the Assets root folder). This means any setup in terms of hierarchy, layers, scripts and references will be obliterated.

Running the syncing operation, then discarding the scenes changes won’t do any good, since the order of the tiles will be changed (I believe they’re sorted based on their maximum height). For me, I ended up creating a boatload of post processing operations to setup all terrain properly again after syncing (adding scripts, adding MicroSplat, registering to Vegetation Studio, etc). There are a few more quirks the sync tool has, but I shouldn’t be too negative, the fact that is exists is awesome!

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Thank you for your valuable insights. One of the reasons I prefer WC2 over Unity’s built in stamping approach is that I don’t want to muck about stamping stuff. I need the terrain generated without my help in a really robust and good fashion and that’s one of the reasons I need a true terrain generator vs some ps clone tool approach.

I don’t mind it replacing the scene contents, that’s actually quite desirable for me, and no problem at all, so long as it’s per-scene, that is :slight_smile: Scenes can be multi scene after all.

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I tried most of the tools on the Unity Asset Store, but none were satisfactory for me. I do Unity in my spare time and of that I don’t have much. So I needed something efficient, non circumstantial and without learning curve. In the end I thought I’d give it a try and purchased WC2. It’s relatively expensive, but in the end it cost less than the sum of all the other terrain tools I tried and have no use for.

You can quickly create all kinds of terrains in WC2. Desert, Arctic, Mountains, Islands, etc. Various sizes. Masking is ideal for Biomes. What you need of course is to populate them and in that regard Vegetation Studio Pro is a must for me. I use the WC2 inbuilt objects and details placement only for prototyping, I don’t import them over to Unity. Only thing that’s not working yet is the HDRP usage of VS Pro. Afaik @LennartJohansen will check it out once the shader graph API is finalized.

Some time ago some guys wanted to see how it looks like, so I made a brief video of using WC2 and Unity and VS Pro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNZVXOJlDms

That’s just random, but shows how it works. Of course this can be streamlined better with custom postprocessing tools as StaggartCreations mentions. eg when you change the terrain height, you don’t want to manually move the objects to the top of the terrain. That stuff I have yet to figure out, but shouldn’t be that hard either via script.

But all in all the combination is imo perfect. Can’t wait for HDRP and VS Pro :smile:

What are you using for streaming? I should check that out at some point :slight_smile:

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Just wanted some insights into WC2 to Unity, I have the grass thing, but I don’t want to use third party if there will be a native solution.

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