How to make a beautiful terrain

Hi everyone,

by the title of my post I would like to know how to make a terrain scene look nice, somewhat looks like the unity bootcamp project? basically i would like to know why my terrain looks so bland, i've added a material to the terrain that could capture normal maps added from textures and even light mapped it ,but it didn't do much. Does this happen because i lack the small details? (small rocks, etc) or is there a certain shader or lightmapping technique for terrains? also, to give more info, I'm using unity free and the terrain i'm currently building is to look somewhat like the ones used in diablo 3 or dota 2.

Thank you so much for your time

 

You make it duh

 

You might as well ask "How do you paint well?"

You really need to focus and reframe the question if you want better feedback, such as "How do I make textures blend more naturally?" Or "How do I sculpt more natural looking mountains?"

Beautiful is such a relative term, and it really depends on what you're going for.

My recommendation, do some research and read up on terrain techniques. Also try looking up third party tools such as Mudbox or World Machine.

EDIT: Oh, and welcome to the community!

 

Also, it might be worth posting an image of what you have right now. That way you can get useful specific critique on areas for improvement.

 

@Not_Sure , yeah, I guess my question is too general as for third party softwares, I did found a great tutorial that used world machine but when I checked the world machine website, the free version is not for commercial use, so, I don’t think I could use it, and thanks for the welcome

@bigSadFace ,here are the images, hopefully these images are enough to get feedbacks :

 

There are a lot of things that can be done to make it look better depending on your environment. For each of the environments you've shown, look at reference photos for the same kind of environment. For instance, look at photos of a forest/grassy landscape environment and compare them to your last image to see what the biggest differences are.

Also a stone cliff wall is usually not going to be that even. One bit of specific advice I would give is to position some of your large stone models all over the cliff walls to make them look more jagged and stone-like.

 

These tools will help you:

• Relief Terrain Pack (RTP) - makes your terrains much more realistic including tons of cool features as well as preventing texture repeating and adding holes into terrains.
• Terrain Composer - upgrades your terrain tools with more settings.
• World Composer - converts real-life terrain from satellite images into your Unity Terrain scene.

At the time of this writing, all assets listed cost $45 (usually $90). They are all compatible with each other and has extensive documentation as well as detailed video tutorials.

These tools are not cheap, but they're worth every cent!

However, such tools are useless if you don't have idea how real-life terrains are structured. So I would suggest you to use Google Images as your inspiration.
And most importantly, practice makes perfect. If you don't want to spend money on such tools, then use existing terrain tools to perfect your skills.

Asset Store is a good source of free terrain textures, but if you're going full pro then use gametextures.com. They include high quality, PBR based materials, normals, diffuse and height maps included. Affordable as well!

Hope this helps!

 

Use a tone control post effect or tone the albedo/diffuse texture maps to suit the scene; and add at least one global fog effect.

 

If you're just learning WM has a free version. Then when you're ready to publish it's a mere $75. You can do $75.

 

Thanks for the feedbacks everyone these are some great inputs, I guess the best way for me to make it is for me to do more research and practice, a lot. But still, at least now I know what to learn and what to do right.

 

If u want Beautiful terrain you have to play game with big beautiful terrain and look at ground to see how they painted that texture and do not do gta 5 terrain it look terrible like terrain in skyrim or witcher 3 it freaking beautiful and copy how detail their terrain do that to you terrain like it water is important beautiful terrain need beautiful stream and river so create beautiful water And use cinema 4d or other modeling software to create Model And u need time too Buy Texture assets in unity store and rock 3d model to add to ur terrain.