Best work flow for creating and editing open-world terrain?

Hi all. I am working on an open-world RPG, but I cant grasp the best way to go about the map creation. I am planing to have a big terrain with islands, ocean, and mountains. I want to create the terrains in World Machine, but I am not sure what is the best work-flow for working with WM, Unity, and big terrains? I can export the terrain into Unity with height maps and make some tweaks with brushes. But, lets say, late in the development I want to add mountains, rivers, or more islands, how would I do that? Sure, I could use the terrain brushes in Unity, but WM would give a much better result. So how can I import my terrain back into WM, edit it, and export into Unity seamlessly?
What is the best workflow for open world games?

 

Simple, yet harsh (sorry about that) answer: Unity in its current state isn't designed for open world out of the box. Even if you manage to stream in terrain tiles with 3rd party assets, you'll still encounter other issues like (one example of many, just when it comes to detail) the shadow distance. If you don't have shadow in the distance, the scene will look ugly. If you amp up the shadow distance, then your close shadows will flicker.

 

I am 99% certain I've seen this exact answer while researching this issue. Are you going around and copying the same text?

 

Even if that were the case, what would be wrong with it?

Late in development - as you say - it's not about changing rough conditions, it's about refining detail and polishing. You should be aware what you run into at the start, not after you spent a lot of time and money into a game.

 

Nothing significant has changed in terms of making big, open worlds in Unity. This engine doesn't provide enough features compared to unreal engine in terms of creating good looking graphics for open world games. At least out of the box.

The only thing unity has managed to provide is a solid replacement for tools like world machine. Creating and painting high quality terrain is simple and rather fast. Every single other thing you would need for a big, open world is either terribly done or doesn't exist, this includes things like:

- LOD system (with lack of a good impostors)
- Cheap and good looking shadows for far away objects
- Level streaming and occlusion culling
- terrain shader (default one is very basic)
- floating point problem (for giant/ infinte worlds).

And probably many more.

Sonner or later you will have to solve every single of these problems. Most common practice is to simply buy stuff from asset store, so better prepare few hundrets of dollars or change game engine to one that has solved these issues.

 

Nothing wrong, just checking if I'm delusional