This is my first post and before you start to rage, I’ve been developing games about 2 years and I’m not making an mmo rpg. I’m a fan of WoW and I would like to try create a similar terrain but don’t know how to work with terrains.
In the spoiler above ^^ you can see some images… I wonder… Is this terrain generated by some terrain tool? Or it’s handmade (I’m talking just about the terraint, not about the trees and game objects)? What do you think?
I know I can’t probably create something like that using Untiy terrain, so are there any softwares you would recomend me? Or somehow I can genereta terrain / hmap but I want to have some control, not just randomly generated… And about these textures… How could I achieve such a master piece… Any ideas?
The terrain is actually made by artists by hand, though they do have a lot of custom tools programmed by their engineers to make it faster. Yeah, WoW is a AAA title with high production values. They can afford all those artists.
Source: An artist talk given at BlizzCon 2013. Also, there’s an excellent video here that shows them making terrain for Spires of Arak in the new Warlords of Draenor expansion:
Direct link to video is below. Video of terrain editing tool is at about 24 seconds.
Unity simple calls this feature “Terrain” and you create it like you would a gameobject cube.
The way terrain works, from what I understand having worked with it a bit, think of it as a big blanket. You lower and raise it along to create the landscape.
Then your blanket has multiple layers of textures. You get to “paint” which textures show up. Sort of like making your own map in the old Warcraft RTS games.
Artist tip: To achieve the look of the top 4 pictures, you want to stretch the texture a little beyond its limit. This creates a look, good or bad is up to you. It certainly works for a game like WoW.
My suggestion, learn a bunch of stuff about how the terrain feature works, then just make a new scene in unity and just practice. Like try painting the textures of the terrain first, then raise the terrain to match. Then try that backwards. Try raising the terrain, then painting it. This should help you learn how to be creative with terrain and get the results you want.
Unity’s terrain workflow probably isn’t near the same as Blizzard’s, but I’m certain replicating WoW terrain is possible within Unity itself. You can also pick up a 3d modelling software such as Blender3d and create your landscapes in it instead.
As far as textures go, you’d probably have to find a texture artist and set up a shader for texture blending.
I don’t really like to advertise for someone, but Axis Game Factory AGFPro2 does a pretty good job of building terrain, and it’s easy, and you can get it on steam for 10 dollars. I don’t know if it does snow.
First of all, thanks for all the answers…
I would like to add that I was working with Unity terrain and I know how it somehow works… I think I could be able to do something like that in Unity but it will cost me a lot of time…
I’m familiar with Unity tool called TerrainToolkit. It’s simply a script that you attach to the terrain and then you can generate terrain hmap… There is also a nice terrain texture setting, I’ll show you what I was able to create with this tool…
But it’s just a piece of map, I suppose I can’t make anything with this… But these textures looks quite nice to me… What do you think?
But I need to be free, I need to give my soul into it. Just a little bit of control, just set where the borders and mountains will be…
So instead of doing this all by hand or making my own hmap, I was thinking about World Machine, or Terragen, or something like that… Unfortunetly I don’t really know how to use it… I would learn it but first I need to know If it will help me to do terrain like in WoW…
I was already trying create terrain in Unity by hand, but I wasn’t able to do in such a detail…
I’m trying to find If there’s some simpler way how to achive that… If it’s not, I will have to learn it properly…
EDIT1:
I want to add that… Simply… I won’t teach something when there is a better way how to do that.
