Creating world on Blender, recommended?

I learned Blender recently, though I've been using Unity for about a year (occupying almost exclusively a programming role through that time). Since I have no experience whatsoever on modelling with Blender for Unity (I know how to export to Unity, create convex colliders, animations and... that's about it), I was wondering whether modelling my world with Blender was a better idea than using a Terrain directly on Unity. At the top of my head I can presume Blender would allow greater flexibility when it comes to shapes, curvatures and topology, but perhaps there are some considerations to be made (for example, the Terrain component allows me to generate trees, which would be very tedious to add one by one on Blender, or place grass with a comfortable grass-brush). I also thought of the possibility of adding a blender-made world to Unity and attaching a Terrain component to it, but I looked this up on the internet and some said this was recommended and some said it was not a good idea, so I don't really know what to think. Perhaps someone with more experience on modelling and world design can aid me with this doubt. Thanks!

 

Terrain is recommended if you are not sure how exactly your world is going to look and/or if it's very large (it allows reshaping more easily with added foliage and trees - they remain 'attached', and it has built-in LOD). If you have a good plan of your environment and it's not just hills and forests, personally i'd suggest going with a combination of multiple mesh-parts made in blender. You can paint foliage and trees with a prefab brush addon like the one that's now free with these unity-own procore tools (don't remember the name), with the exception that those obviously won't stay where they are if you reshape your level; but in turn you gain greater flexibility in how you render or batch them (or whether you want them to be interactable). For smaller levels the automatic terrain LOD can even be unnecessary or counterproductive, as with pixel error 0 it's still transitioning LODs or that you can't have caves or overhangs which you'd normally model in blender then anyway. In the end it mostly depends on your level design, a combination of both could also be fine.

 

Last year I built a landscape in unity and also considered sculpting it in blender. In the end, as with the above post, I realised unity took care of a lot of the smaller details such as LOD.

I used mapmagic and megasplat with unity in the end. I also had pro-builders mesh tools. (No built into unity I believe, or at least free)

I have 7 more landscapes to do. So may look at using blender to create the texture maps, height maps and so forthe and see if I can use a mixture of blender and unity to find a decent middle ground.

I imagine new tools with some good pricing are likely to have been released since my last project. So may look at what’s new.

 

Oh in blender you can use the particle effects with the hair modifier to place objects on a mesh surface such as trees. Look for a how to make a city in blender on YouTube to find the tutorial

 

Thank you guys, pretty good information. I will for sure take a look a the tutorial you mentioned, Emiles.