Do you prefer to use unity terrains or meshes?

Hi guys,

Ive been generally wondering what everyone prefers to work with in terms of landscapes/environments? would you rather use the Terrain system in unity or use a Mesh for landscapes? Why do you prefer one or the other?

Ive been producing some assets on the unity asset store and am contemplating whether to stick with offering textured unity terrains or whether people don't even care/want unity terrains and want meshes instead, in which case i could produce likely better quality products than with the unity terrain engine. (iam not capable of writing my own custom shader sadly)

Let me know what you think please.

 

I think good starting point for you, is to look int Asset store, and see, howmay relevant assets have been downloaded.

I use custom mesh, as there is no Unity Terrain out of box solution for me.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I dont think there is a way to see how many times an asset has been downloaded is there?

 

No, but you can judge based on reviews number.

 

looking at my own asset sales, review numbers dont seem to correlate at all with sale in average, maybe on larger numbers like 1000 reviews

but thats also why i made this poll

 

I would prefer meshes but those I could get where realistic and lowpoly enough, but had problems with tiling, were not lining up perfectly.

though any way it doesn't matter, but if terrain, then would need couple dozen square miles. for which the new terrain tiling would be great (if it could work quick)

 

cool, thanks for the reply.
i see how tiling several meshes could be an issue whereas there are easy ways to stitch terrains together. My main issue with unity terrains is the simplicity of its shader, it just doesn't allow for triplanar shading or height blending out of the box which is a shame. I guess i may have to learn how to write my own shader in order to create higher quality terrains for sale.

 

Except just like with reviews the people who vote on the poll won't necessarily represent a significant portion of your target audience. Worse yet they might not be your audience at all as unlike with reviews there is no requirement for them to have made a purchase before voting.

 

thats a valid and good point, review scouring it is then!

 

Depends entirely on the use case. My current game uses the terrain system for the player's current location, and meshes for stuff on the horizon.

 

As angrypenguin said, it'll depend entirely on the use case. Thought it might be helpful to run through some released games and talk about why we used them.

For TitanicVR, we had scanned heightmap data for the ocean floor, so could use that to generate undulation and give a proper feel of how the sea floor would look. This was then painted in unity using (if I recall correctly) RTP as the shader.

For Raid on the Ruhr, the entire landscape was done with meshes. The game is an infinite runner where the terrain streams past the player in 1km+ chunks. We used custom 4 and 8 splat shaders with full PBR.

For 1943: Berlin Blitz, we used both. The airfield at Langar (and surrounding landscape) is terrain with splatmaps painted in photoshop, based on aerial photos and height data (the UK's height data is free, btw). The rest of the missions had gradually scrolling meshes beneath the player. The bomber flies at about 6km, too high to see any height differentiation in those types of terrains, so a flat mesh with exaggerated normal mapping was sufficient to light it.

In general going forward (though exceptions will always crop up), the splats will be hand painted as they give much better results than in-unity painting. Whether that's on a terrain or mesh will depend entirely on the use case. For large, static landscapes that we have to traverse through, terrain fits better.

For smaller terrains, ones that are non-static, or ones where we don't do any significant traversal, often a mesh will be sufficient (as we can go high-res up close and lower further out, something Unity's terrain does great dynamically but an artist can do more efficiently if we're not moving around too much).

 

thats some really good info there. brilliant.

going on form this, If you were to buy a terrain from the store, would you be fine with a shader dependency from another asset to facilitate much better high quality texturing out of the box or would you expect such a shader to come with the terrain/environment you purchase?

 

It all depends on the project im working on.

 

Shader dependencies would rule them out for me. However, again, this is highly use-case dependent. The terrain is a major component of our game's performance, and it also has to integrate with a number of gameplay features. If it's just a background thing or you only need one terrain then it's perhaps not such a big deal to just go with whatever an off-the-shelf solution already gives you.

 

I use terrain for close up chunks, then I generate low-poly meshes for distant chunks. When the player gets close, it swaps out the mesh for a terrain. This lets me render REALLY far for essentially no cost, especially since all of my mesh chunks use the same material (I assemble all of the terrain chunk's splatmaps into a single low-res texture) so static batching merges them.