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Best tools for modular terrain building

Discussion in 'World Building' started by snacktime, May 25, 2018.

  1. snacktime

    snacktime

    Joined:
    Apr 15, 2013
    Posts:
    3,356
    So I've used I think all of the terrain tools on the asset store. Terrain composer 2 being the one exception, although I do own it. So far I don't see any of them being of much help but thought I'd throw out what we are doing here and see if someone has ideas I haven't thought of or just missed.

    Maps in our game to start with are all islands. And they will be terrains due to generally better shading support for terrains for this kind of thing.

    We will be building the maps from modular mesh building blocks. Starting with a set of base terrains or meshes (undecided on that part still). So we place the blocks on the terrain, combine it all, then create a heightmap. Finally do some smoothing or add roughness here and there.

    Every part of a map in our game has strategic value and the mesh building blocks will be hand crafted. There are right at half a dozen distinct block types right now, and then we will have variation within each of those.

    I'd like to use a procedural tool for generating the base terrain, but it looks that might go the mesh route also. I have yet to find a tool that can create islands procedurally that doesn't have some limitation that makes it unable to generate the shapes we need.

    Anyone else created this type of workflow? If so any existing tools you found useful?