Best way to create a big terrain ?

Hi all ,

I'm quite new to Unity though I've been using Blender for a few years. I'm starting to work on a few projects but I had a big question and I can't seem to find any good answer on the internet.

I basically want to create a big island to explore in first person, but I don't really know what is the best way to create the terrain. I've made a rough drawing of a map to get a general idea of the shape and features of the island, but how should I proceed then ? Should I just sculpt it ? Is Unity good enough for that or should I do the modelling in Blender ? And the problem with sculpting is that the terrain usually ends up looking like some random blobs here and there instead of a realistic mountain or whatever. Is there another, better way ? With a heightmap ? And how should I draw it anyway ? Or are there any good softwares to use (I'm on Mac BTW) ?

So to summarise, I'd like to know how really big maps are made in "real" games. All the tutorials I could find were very basic and for beginners, and I'd like to go a bit further than that, do something more "professional" and try to avoid doing "easy-but-clumsy" things, know how to handle a much bigger map, how to balance between enough detail and poly count and all. I'm not expecting any magical solution or anything, but if someone could clarify that subject or give any kind of tips that'd be nice

Sorry if my question seems a bit messy, I hope you understand the general idea at least

Blisti

 

I was struggling with the same thing and I purchased the Gaia plug-in from the asset store when it was on sale. Well worth the investment. It will do islands.

 

Thanks, I guess I'll try with that if you recommend it

 

Depends on how big you mean by "big." Gaia is definitely a good "gateway drug" for terrains. You could create a decent sized explorable island with a few button clicks with Gaia. If your game is on foot, it'd take some time to navigate even a single terrain tile. It won't look like random blobs either, it'll look like a real, usable environment with reasonable terrain features, beach area, grass, and trees with the default settings. It's very cool.

If you mean a truly huge terrain, you can use multiple terrain "tiles." The upcoming Terrain Composer 2 used with the RTP shaders has some interesting features for creating huge multi-tiled environments and automatically streaming them in as needed.

 

Wow, I just checked Terrain Composer and it looks awesome ! I'll have to think about which one to take between the two.

By "big" I meant something "worth exploring", not just the small terrains from quick tutorials but the kind of terrain from the Terrain Composer 2 video, so this is definitely what I was looking for Thanks !

 

FYI, a single terrain tile can still be a pretty big environment. I created a test island with Gaia once, put down a road circuit via EasyRoads, and plopped a prefab car from Edy's Vehicle Physics in. Took a while to *drive* a lap around the island.

EDIT: Side note, another asset geared toward huge environments is called Map Magic. Looks pretty interesting too.

 

Yeah I can understand that for running/driving around, but for a flying simulation for example, I guess you'd need a pretty big map

 

Exactly. When TC2 comes out, I was planning on playing with it for an environment where you fly between locations in a jet-like vehicle. TC2 will have built-in support for a technique called a "floating origin." That's not particularly difficult to do anyway, but it's a way to solve an issue where you run out of unit precision the further you get from the game world's origin. So with that technique you're essentially unlimited in how far you can travel.