High quality terrain, heightmap

Hello Community!

I want to build a 20x20km Normandy, Omaha beach map for unity.
I used terrain.party and opentopography for creating the heightmaps but both gives a low resolution.
Is there any way to increase the resolution of the heightmap or the terrain? Thanks a lot!

 

To increase the heightmap res of unity's terrain itself (don't know about the other programs) go to your terrain, click the settings icon, scroll down until you find this:
(first one)

 

Thank you! Will try that.

Also discovered now "1 meter Digital Elevation Models" (DEMs).

Is this method better for making terrains for unity? Or does it have any disadvantages?
How could i make/get 1 meter DEMs from Normandy, France?

 

Is it possible to increase the heightmap terrain detail quality with World Machine?

 

Yea, you can use any third-party terrain generation tool to increase existing heightmap quality.

TerreSculptor - Free Fully and opensource (free but powerful as any other terrain generator)
Gaea - Free (Limited to 1024/1025 res heightmaps for exporting) and Paid versions for higher res and extra features.
World Creator - Paid
World Machine - Paid (Free version is non-commercial and also limited to 1024/1025 res)

All the limited ones to 1024 wouldn't really benefit you editing such a large terrain even if you broke it up into 20 different 1024 resolution files. The output after editing each wouldn't tile together as the original so you would have to use a paid version of one of those programs or try TerreSculptor. Terresculptor only supports exporting tiles at 256 though
Tile Creator (export heightmap as tiles, up to 256×256)
so you'd end up with


6400 heightmaps at 256 res for a 20km map, which also means 6400 terrain tiles at 256x256m in Unity. One for each of those heightmaps.


The best option other than that is to create detailed heightmaps to use as stamps in one of those tools. In Unity, you use the terrain editor (Terrain Tools to stamp those details on the terrain to make it higher res/quality. This way you can also control where is detailed and skip places where you won't see or don't need to be as detailed.



The Terrain Tools Samples already comes with a few that might be useful but if not you can make your own.
https://blog.unity.com/games/the-latest-unity-terrain-sample-pack-is-here

 

thanks man! really usefull informations!