Best tools for sculpting small terrain?

I'm looking to improve my terrain in my fishing simulator and I'm wondering what tools in or outside of Unity are good for detailed work needed to sculpt lakes and river beds. At the moment I have Terrain and world composer and I have the free evaluation of World Machine but ideally I need to be able to dig in meter accuracy & World Machine, or at least my understanding of it doesn't give much control in that aspect, just drawing shapes, which is pretty good but not ideal.

My terrains aren't huge. Just big enough to surround a decent sized lake, I don't care about painting trees etc just the height/splat/maps and geometry. I was going to try sculptris but figured I'd ask here first.

Any suggestions please?

 

World Machine is very ideal for any type of terrain, you can play with normal map to "bump" the terrain and add some vegetation as details in unity directly ? dunno just an idea thou

 

Maybe i need to look in to it more but I didn't get the impression of much control in World Machine.

Here's what i have so far...

 

Draw your lake and river shapes in PS using spline outlines. Fill in the lake with dark and the rest with light grey. Blur it this way and that to get slopes of varying degrees. Add Render->Clouds to various selections and blend modes to get the secondary and tertiary bumps. I imagine you could use the selections to create splat maps while yer doing that part of the process.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I actually did that. It worked out pretty well but i didn't know how deep i was going, i suppose i could figure out what shade of grey was which depth though.

 

There's various ways to get more control in World Machine. The basic idea is that you create the rough shapes either outside of WM, or by using the Layout tool (which I find uncomfortable to work with tbh). After that, you modify it in WM. The reason for this is that creating good looking mountains with erosion and such by hand, is virtually impossible. Technically you can, but it's a massive waste of time.

The way I do it, is by sculpting the base in Blender, rendering the heightmap and use it as base in WM. Once it's set up, it's comfortable to work with and gives you a great amount of control.

It basicall boils down to this:
Blender:

• Rough shape

World Machine:

• Errosion, Terraces and other forms of manipulation
• Splatmap
• Final heightmap

 

Well you mentioned Sculptris.
That's a good idea derkoi!
Very nice Sculpting software!
Blender and Maya are nice too.
Enjoy!

 

Normally:
White is like top of mountain.
Black is like the deep bottom.
Anything in between these two colours is grey.
50% grey is like middle of mountain.

The darker the grey is: means you are going deeper into the ground. Or lower down the mountain.
The lighter the grey is: means you are ascending to the top of the mountain. Or coming close to the top of the ground.

I hope I was able to explain it easily, for you to understand.
Cheers!

 

Thanks I know all of that but i need to be accurate. I need part of the lake to be 2m deep for example.