What is the best solution for a 50km diameter island?

I painted the Terrain. And as a true test, I created a Terrain from GameObject>3D Object> Terrain, clicked on the terrain in the Scene Window, clicked the little icon of the mountain and cog in the Inspector Window, scrolled down a bit and changed the scale to 50000 x 50000, then painted it with trees using the Mass Place Trees button. A million trees were not enough, so I increased it to 100 million trees. They were like blackheads, and when I zoomed in, the image broke to pieces. Thee was no lag, it just broke. This scale is unfeasible using this software. Looks like Iā€™m stuck with option one - to create small locations plus a small island. Iā€™ll just have to use smoke and mirrors when I fly from one place to the next :frowning:

ah yeah i kinda missed that you were about to literally spam 1 million gOā€™s (Sorry), which no one does, lol. Though maybe if the trees were 2D Sprites the trick could work, but if we are talking about rocks also it will be kinda strange that everything is flat, if thatā€™s not an artstyle you want to achieve.

Probably there is no solution to spam 100k complex gOā€™s or 1 million sprites in an only one scene.

Also if you have a weak PC not a 10k$ one or something you should not go above 1k complex to GPU and CPU GameObjects in a one scene.

Actually you should add what PC setup you have, so people could tell how much you can do at once.

To be honest I donā€™t understand why you need a 50km island exactly, why just not change the concept that there are many islands or change the small island to another in the next series? Probably most people wont even notice if it will be similar enough

Ed.
(especially considering you need only 5 main basic locations on it and else is trees and rocks or do u plan to spam something 100k in there too?)

No, itā€™s not. What you do is you create the small local areas, the general area around those, and then you hide the transition to a lower detail model through camera and effects trickery, not just a cut. You use a bit of motion blur to draw away from the fact that youā€™re changing detail levels, move over a scene that is much more simplified, then do the same in reverse to the transition to the new area.

You donā€™t want a 50km island, you want the illusion of one, and thatā€™s more about visual technique than it is tech.

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Personally I wouldnā€™t even try this, 50km is huge for a map, you would need to travel at 18,000 km/h just to do a 10 second transition from one end of the map to the other. The only way you wouldnā€™t get motion sick is to do a view from space so even a fixed top down image like google maps would do. It sounds like this isnā€™t for a game so you might want to just use a modeling program to render it to video. Unreal also has much better large world support.

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My PC is an Intel Core-i7 8700K 3.7GHz with a GTX1080Ti GPU and 32GB RAM and 30TB hard drive and solid state drive space. The hundred million trees seemed to appear perfectly fine, but zooming at that scale tore a hole through the entire terrain when I zoomed closer than about 10km away. Iā€™ve seen this problem in Sketchup when I designed robotic components. There are workarounds to increase zoomability by altering the core code of the software, but I canā€™t be bothered - I want Unity Upgrades to work etc. Iā€™d prefer to work within the capabilities of what the software limitations are. There is a zoom threshold in these kinds of programs. If you walk into a leaf, there is a distance at which you will see a hole forming in it. This may be set to 0.1% of the total zoomscale, not to a specific real world scale as you might expect. Therefore if you make a full sized city or island, you need to modify Unity files so that the zoomscale is extended down to something like 0.00001%. Its easy to do if you know which file to modify, but its just not worth it when redrawing a small scale model of the island has a lot less problems.

You want me to rewrite my story to fit one of the software programs Iā€™m using?

Thatā€™s correct. Thatā€™s what I will need to do. I have tested the limitations of this software and Iā€™ll have to transition to a smaller model of the island if I want those beautiful transitions. The blur trickery rather than a cut is what I meant by cut. Its a poor mans version of a proper animation.

well that is exactly(i guess) what tech indie people do when they come to an unresolvable problem when doing something solo.

There are many ways to solve the ā€œbig island takesā€ and ā€œtransitionsā€ with the video editing software also.

Your question is more about making a film skills and why exactly you want to do it in Unity? The film guys usually use the Unreal, though donā€™t know about have they tried the 50km there, probably it is not possible in any software in real time, you should cover up the problems with the Art Of Making The Film stuff probably.

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This isnā€™t a software limitation, itā€™s a production one. Youā€™ll find the same thing done in loads of animations at all production scales when it comes to dealing with this sort of thing.

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And by secret gonna tell ya if you also plan to make animation clips for rigs and other complex stuff manually in Unity, ditch this one idea, it has zero good enough solution for this one

Yes, Iā€™ve heard Unreal deals with this better. Blender has the same limitations as Unity. I created a 50km city in Sketchup and Enscape but I thought Iā€™d give Unity a go. The Sketchup city relied on clever use of a skybox to make it appear as though the entire moon continued to the horizon. Iā€™ll see if I can find it:

well if we fill the scene in this one with bunch of objects even the occlusion and LODs wonā€™t help us. It is pretty barebone in the video

Iā€™ve done it before in Sketchup. It is a software limitation. Donā€™t worry, everyone on the Sketchup forums said it couldnā€™t be done as well. Itā€™s possible to hack the software to increase the zoom scale like I said, but this makes everything really difficult to navigate. Iā€™d rather do it the easy way.

You may have scaled the terrain incorrectly. The terrainā€™s transform scale should be left at 1x1x1. Instead you should set the terrainā€™s size in the Terrain settings.

A 50km terrain isnā€™t demanding at all.

I did do that. Try zooming into a tree on the 50kmx50km terrain. Let me know how it goes.

It goes wellā€¦ :slight_smile:

Can you do a screen recording? How did you override the zoom threshold problem?

How are you zooming? Are you using the WADS keys to move around or the mouse scroll wheel?. You should be moving around with WADS keys while holding down the right mouse button.

If you really need this kind of scale Iā€™d suggest switching to Unreal. They recently added 64bit Coordinate System for Large World Coordinates to avoid the max size issues. I think the far clipping planes on most cameras max out at around 10km (but at that scale youā€™ll have z fighting issues). Most games just have another camera for really far away objects.

Unreal also has Nanite and world partition.

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