Question Creating a very large terrain

Hello,
so I want to create a large terrain, about 50,000 x 50,000 . This is for a flight simulator type game which will obviously be viewed only from the air so I don't need the sort of details you see in a FPS but I would like some mountains here and there and a couple of rivers/ lakes in game. My camera will never go outside this area but I don't want the edge of the terrain to be visble whilst on the edge of this terrain.
A couple of questions :
1. Would there be any advantages / disadvantages in using 1 large terrain vs multiple smaller terrains.
2. Regarding not wanting my terrain edges to be visible I was thiniking I could surround my main terrain/s with other featureless terrains so no hard terrain edges were visble, do you think this would be acceptable or would you do it a different way.


BTW I'm using 2021.3.0f1 HDRP

Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

This sounds like a case of probably trying it ...

But I suspect that the built in terrain may not be the best tool here, and a custom mesh would be a lot better fit - then you can easily do things like LOD to get increased performance

 

You will want to use multiple terrain sections and create mesh based LOD for sections that are farther from player. If you are concerned about jitter, you can use floating point fix solutions for automatically moving sections around the player. But jitter might not be noticeable down on the ground, since it would be far away from player.

The player's cockpit will jitter, though, if you move that along with the player. One option is to stack cameras and have the cockpit simply rotate but not actually move within the scene. I have done that in 3D space games, and it offers decent results.

As for designing large terrains, you could surround it with an ocean. That way there is no hard edge.

 

Thanks for the input.
After playing around with the default terrain I have decided I'll be better off with terrain created in blender as has been suggested.
The problem with the default terrain is its more geared towards being viewed from ground level, when viewed from above you can see the tiling effect.
I'm currently trying uv mapping ground textures into a blender created terrain.

 

Instead of building a terrain in Blender, you should probably check out something like Gaea (QuadSpinner), World Machine, or World Creator. Here are links:
https://quadspinner.com/
https://www.world-machine.com/
https://www.world-creator.com/

You can design your terrain with one of those tools, export the height map, and then import it into Unity.

 

Try Atlas Terrain Editor better than world creator.

 

Cheers but I'm going to try creating my terrains with blender

 

Blender is one option, but there are other tools that work better for creating large terrains. For example, I really like using QuadSpinner Gaea for creating large realistic terrains. I have used QuadSpinner Gaea and World Machine. Gaea is a lot more modern and easier to work with than World Machine.

I have not personally used Atlas Terrain Editor, but the videos for it look very impressive as well. If I was starting a new project right now, I would definitely evaluate that tool.

I have used Procedural Worlds Gaia Pro 2021, which is another terrain asset that runs inside Unity. It is pretty good and has decent features. For my current project, I generated the terrain using QuadSpinner Gaea Pro and then used Procedural Worlds Gaia Pro 2021 to work with it inside Unity. That workflow is not required, though. I create my terrain in QuadSpinner Gaea Pro and rule based paint that terrain using Procedural Worlds Gaia Pro 2021.

If you are really serious about building a realistic 50,000 x 50,000 map, you owe it to yourself to look at the popular terrain tools. You can get a free version of both QuadSpinner Gaea and World Machine. At the very least, I would recommend comparing the free version of QuadSpinner Gaea and Blender, and then see which you liked best.

 

Hi I have looked at quadspinner but I couldn't really get any decent results and I already know my way round blender a bit so will probably stick with blender.