Am I doing something wrong or is Unity's terrain really garbage?

I can't get terrain to sculpt worth crap, and I keep looking around for tutorial on it, but all I find are things about the grass and trees and other features. But the terrain's actual geometry just won't sculpt properly, and I can't figure out what's wrong.

For starters, the smoothing tool, well, it doesn't smooth anything.

Let's say I have two flat sections and I want to have a gentle slope going between them. I simply can't acheive this. If I try to paint in some terrain betwen the two areas, no matter how carefully I approach the heigher edge, I still get overlap from the brush where it raises the higher section. This wouldn't be so bad if I could actually smooth the geometry afterward, but even with the tool strength pushed up to the maximum I can only slightly round a few rough edges; I have no ability to actually smooth out the shape into anything that looks natural.

I can try to terrace the area by making a series of strokes with the flatten tool, but these terraces still just don't smooth out into a single slope. I can polish it for five straight minutes and only get the edges rounded, not the actual shape of the geometry. I can use larger brushes and sharper brushes and smaller brushes and softer brushes, but I am constantly left with the same result.
This is particularly frustrating when compared to the fact that I can't even set the paint to to a strength of "1" without it turning into a freaking firehose.

What am I doing wrong here? I can't fathom that Unity would actually make a terrain system this broken and still not fix it after three years. Why can't I sculpt my basic geometry?

 

Agreed. Unity's terrain system is S***

 

Can you post a screen shot? My expectations may be quite different but I'm not having too many problems with the massive terrain I'm working on.

 

It's lacking for sure, but definitely not a "garbage" as you said. To get any effects for the terrain there's this handy little thing called "Brush Mask Filter", go and play around with that, learn it... don't just bullshitting nonsense without knowing what you can really do with the terrain.

I know you'll be pissed to what I'm about to say... READ THE DOCS, GO WATCH MORE TUTORIALS!

Cheers..

 

I was struggling with it too but now I think it works quite well. Did you download the Terrain Sample Asset pack from the Unity asset store? It's free and contains many more terrain brushes, it's really essential.

Unity's Terrain asset pack (1.6 GB):
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/landscapes/terrain-sample-asset-pack-145808

Especially Stamp Terrain tool and then using the erosion (or smoothing tool or Effect->Slope Flatten tool) works very well for me. The stamp brushes was really a huge deal, no need to import a height map to make things look interesting/realistic. Of course your terrain's height map resolution will affect the level of detail (this is used for terrain painting even if you don't import a height map image).

I have a setup of multiple terrains (4x4x8192 m = 1024 km2) and sculpting over the edges between terrains works perfectly.

Brush Mask Filter I just discovered, a bit hard to use, but after some experimenting I got it to work with painting textures based on the Height mask option. Check the docs on this I would say.

 

It was outdated hot garbage 10 years ago, and it hasn't changed that much since.

 

The sculpting system isn't bad at all and works just fine.

Texturing a landscape though.. if you feel like wasting time sure...

You are better off just making a landscape in another program importing it and then adding a shader to it to apply your materials to the proper faces and slopes along with blending them.

For some reason the terrain editor has no mesh renderer and adding a custom shader to it is super annoying.