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[Official] New Terrain System

Discussion in 'General Graphics' started by bibbinator, Jul 4, 2014.

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  1. knr_

    knr_

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    I agree - if the question was also about level building specifically, or both terrain and level building.

    Either way, I would love to see that built right into the editor.
     
  2. cakeslice

    cakeslice

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    For terrain I think Unity should try to get some tips from Epic... this is by far the best terrain I've ever seen in any game:
     
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  3. Daniel-Talis

    Daniel-Talis

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    I'd like to see the random generation of high quality terrains with a save feature. (including caves, overhangs, forests, deserts, snow, etc.) Infinite random terrains.
     
    Last edited: Mar 5, 2015
  4. darkhog

    darkhog

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    Which, again, requires some sort of voxel system. Heightmap-based one just won't do here. True, you can generate random terrain with heightmap system - perhaps even infinite one, but you can't generate caves and overhangs with it, because of how heightmaps works.
     
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  5. jchapman723

    jchapman723

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    Native support for touch bending vegetation would be amazing.
     
  6. boysenberry

    boysenberry

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  7. Xoduz

    Xoduz

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    Who are you?
    I am a solo indie developer from Norway

    What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
    An online singleplayer RPG :>

    How does terrain fit into that?
    It will have many small terrains (50x50, 100x100, 150x150) for different areas that players go to.

    What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
    I'd like to have better control over scaling trees (fake edit: Just as I wrote this, I realized that there IS better control over scaling trees in Unity 5 terrains! yay! :p) and to see more options for blending grass better with terrain.
     
  8. Reanimate_L

    Reanimate_L

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    Just curious is the grass and speedtrees/Trees rendering are counted as part of terrain system? if it yes i really hope it get improved. On the rendering side ,Speedtrees are not using any PBR shading no smooth LOD transition and no more translucent leaves (we have it before with tree creator). Better foliage and grass animation, also touch bending for foliage and grass.

    Also this could be a good reference for the terrain noise and brush system http://www.decarpentier.nl/
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2015
  9. Deccypher

    Deccypher

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    I would like to see a terrain system that emulates real life as much as possible that is destructible depending in its type ( example snow and sand can be worn down by just moment over it where as granite hills would take a explosion or something.) would like to use it for a survival game series and a flight drone sim ( in the survival game the Teriann would be able to be dug though for resources so the block would need several different states untouched, worn damaged farmed, re-groth
    untouched - noone even walked over it no weather erosion
    worn - either someone walked over it or weather eroded it
    damaged - something shot it exploded by it or crashed by it, or someone has begun to dig it.
    farmed- someone has dig it almost to destruction
    re-groth - it was worn or damaged a while algo and has repaired somewhat- but wil never be the same again :)

    this would be good because in the flight sim id like to see the terrain get destroyed somewhat as planed crash, so you can see the scars of war ect on the landscape and on the survival mode it will add a air of realism as the player farms out an area.

    id also lie to see natural settling of the terrain. Id like to put wind currents into the game , along the wind currents erosion of the terrain is more likely, and if a hole is dug or exploded at the base of a hill the terrain system would have a % change of land slide to fill in the hole and reduce the over all height f the hill, as would happen in real life.

    one last thing in a terrain system, is the resources found within, currently the way most systems work is there is prefab blocks of groups of resources randomly seeded in whatever terrain is used for example in 7 days to die its all stone with "veins" of other material or groups of material placed randomly, however if you learn the formation of these prefabs a player can randomly mine till he/she finds one and know exactly where what or will be. id like to see it more of a realistic model something like

    sedimentary rock has a 40% change of containing iro or block and Iron block and 10% more likely to appear where there is already iron next to it there is a 5% change that within the iron there is a cobalt a 1% change that there will be gold ect ect so when the random map generates no prefabs are needed and should lead to large random pools of resources.


    i know this isn't all terrain based and uses outside influences like the weather system i'm making to effect it but you asked what we wanted and what we would use it for so here it is :)
     
  10. shkar-noori

    shkar-noori

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  11. LividPixel

    LividPixel

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    Who are you?

    I am the lead developer of a small independent studio.

    What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

    We're working on a first-person adventure/puzzle game involving island exploration.

    How does terrain fit into that?

    The environment is where the entire game takes place, and as most of it will take place outside, the landscape will likely be a majority of the environment.

    What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?

    The bare minimum that is keeping the current terrain system from being considered 'AAA' by my standards is the PBR introduced by the new standard shader. I'd love to be able to use some of our beautiful PBR textures to create shiny mud, wet rocks, puddles, etc. I definitely want some tessellation height-map capabilities; maybe even some height-based layer blending, so that on the border of texture changes from a rocky landscape to a sandy one, the rocks can pop up out of the sand. I thought that was one of the features that was executed quite well in UE4, and the alpha blending of the current terrain seems a bit plain.

    Aside from that, it'd be nice to have a system that allowed for breaking up the repetition in the tiling of textures over large distances. In UE4, this could be accomplished by blending large sized textures over the full area for a texture. I can see the ability to rotate the texture brush may help this as well.

    Some sort of spline texturing system to allow easy creation of things such as roads and paths would be nice as well, but this could probably be accomplished manually if the texture brush could be rotated.

    I suppose foliage could use an update as well, and possibly water, but that's all I can think of. I'm really glad to see that the terrain system will be improved; it's really just about the only thing from Unity 5 that didn't feel completely cutting-edge to me.
     
  12. darkhog

    darkhog

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    So you basically want voxel-based terrain. I'm surely hope Unity will go that route for new terrain. Modern hardware can tackle fairly complex voxel terrain, which games like Planet Explorers, Blockscape and Landmark (ok, last two aren't Unity-based) has proven.

    Heightmap-based terrain is just passe. You can't do things like caves or overhangs with it, voxel terrain is just future.
     
  13. Reanimate_L

    Reanimate_L

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    1. Terrain Decal tools
    Can we get this tool added to unity terrain system??? :D

    around 1:49 - 1:51,
    So basically somekind of snap to surface stuff, can be used with objects group (contain multiple asset in it) or (example from that video) is one mesh rock and ground with two material for the rocks and the ground ,the ground material take the terrain texture beneath it so it blend perfectly with the terrain.

    2. Change Grass detail/Detail Mesh materials.
    would be great if we can add normal/spec to the grass textures
     
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  14. elmar1028

    elmar1028

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    You can't just buy his company. it involves lots of paper work and he may say "no".

    Maybe hiring him would be a better idea ;)
     
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  15. knr_

    knr_

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    Fair enough :p
     
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  16. Reanimate_L

    Reanimate_L

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    Hi unity terrain team,
    Can we get some improvement for the terrain input interface? Something like this maybe
    TerrainInputUI.jpg
    Input slot is stackable just the same as material editor in the inspector so we can save UI space
    TerrainInputUI_Stacked.jpg

    For Details and trees Tab almost basically the same except instead Splatmap Slot it use gameobjects
    TerrainUIDetailsAndTrees.jpg
    and the game objects group UI
    TerrainUIObjectGroup.jpg

    Check box slot in the Detail/Trees are for multi mesh/objects painting almost the same if we select Object group.
     
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  17. mrtkhosravi

    mrtkhosravi

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    Who are you?
    I am an independent developer

    What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
    open world fighter plane simulator

    How does terrain fit into that?
    All the ground world should be terrain

    What use-cases, features, workflows do you have or would like to see?
    Terrain has one big issue when you try to set heightmap at runtime. Using TerrainData.SetHeights is very slow on terrains with 512 heightmap and above and this creates annoying spikes if you try to set terrain heightmap at runtime. calling Setheights with partial data to update a small portion of terrain is not much better and even if you update one pixel it still takes huge time. This issue also prevent the ability to create destructible terrains.
     
  18. imaginaryhuman

    imaginaryhuman

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    I think its fairly clear that people want to be able to build terrains in the editor, fair enough, but also to generate them on the fly procedurally, to build them at runtime, and to EDIT them at runtime as part of the gameplay... destructible environments. I think that dynamic functionality (including collider updates that are really fast) should be top priority for any new terrain system. I don't want to just sculpt a single terrain and have it sit there, I want it to be much more dynamic.
     
  19. Baldinoboy

    Baldinoboy

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    I would really appreciate just better terrain texture/shader setup (specular and rough inputs, Colormap, Normalmap, Detail normals, POM) built in. All these things would be cool but I would be content with just a colormap and normalmap. Was really hoping the standard terrain shader would at least have Colormap.

    The ability to cut holes in the terrain. I mean voxel is cool but for crying out loud we cannot even cut a hole in the current terrain. That would be nice.

    Better tree and detail placement. Can paint more than one plant, tree, and/or rock at a time. Set individual objects to only be placed at certain heights, textures, and/or angles. Also a check box to match the angle of the terrain.

    Better tree and detail setup/rendering. Basically placing of prefabs that are unchanged to work with the terrain. Just add a rock and it places it with the prefabs shader, texture, and collision. Same for plants. This would give the ability to place plants with the AFS touchbending setup. That would be amazing. PBR tree creator shaders. Different billboard technique or at least have the terrain billboard texture editable so at least I could get rid of the artifacts.

    Also it would help to have the bugs from early 4.x fixed. One of them being max mesh trees setting not doing anything.

    To me these are the minimal features a good terrain system needs. Thanks
     
  20. goat

    goat

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    That is the best one I've seen, almost looks like parts of Switzerland.
     
  21. Baldinoboy

    Baldinoboy

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    Photogrammetry and reference photos were taken in New Zealand. It is a beautiful scene. I have yet to play with the UE4 terrain so not sure of the features.
     
  22. goat

    goat

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    OK, I made my requests in before in this thread and in posts in several other threads but I've since had a refinement in how to approach this ideal of making it easy to create somewhat realistic terrains easily that don't put too much of a strain on the HW.

    You approach it like a PDF layered cartography map. I even believe somewhere there is open source code for doing that. Certainly, openStreets.org has a similar approach at adding layers to a cartographic rendering by resource type.

    Heightmaps are good but ultimately sacrifice too much other detail of non-earth details for higher precision in the drawing of the earth.

    To build a terrain in Unity 5 I should be able to, via cartographic layers:

    a. Layer 1: Location - Define a map quadrant (simple flat plane)
    b. Layer 2: Elevation - Define the lines of elevations, either by drawing in the map quadrant directly and assigning a height or Unity using 3rd party government data files. (now you could have mountains, hills, and so on) - use a chosen precision of PI to create desired smoothness between two non-intersecting elevation levels.
    c. Layer 3: Rivers - Define breadth & depth
    d. Layer 4: Lakes - Defined with land elevation height at the lake surface
    e. Layer 5: Glaciers - Defined with the glacier elevation lines at the glacier surface.
    f. Layer 6: Oceans - Defined by equating sea level with a land elevation level (or all water types can be combined in one layer and the different types handled by subtags.)
    g. Layer 7: Geology - dirt and stone composition - boundaries and types defined with vector lines superimposed over the topography elevation definition
    h. Layer 8: Botany - defined by vectors of demarcation, density (related to heat maps of ideal growing conditions within the range), and random maturity (related to time since last logging, forest fires, diseases, and so on). Types of vegetation can overlap.
    i. Layer 9: Zoology - defined by vectors of demarcation (ranges), density (related to heat maps of ideal living conditions for the life form), and random maturity (related to time since last hunt, forest fires, floods, diseases, food availability variability and so on).
    j. Layer 10: Roads - roads with various types of roads (mostly in the number of lanes and public or toll and so on) being handled by tagging road types rather than creating many different layers for each type of road.
    k. Layer 11: Railroads - or you can combine all transportation infrastructure into one layer and then define definition with tags
    l. Layer 12: Shipping/Ferry - cargo ships, ferries, recreation water craft
    m. Layer 13: Airports - airport runways and allowable flight paths in air
    n. Layer 14: Residential - residential buildings
    o. Layer 15: Business - business buildings
    p. Layer 16: Government - government buildings (or all building can be combined in one layer and subtypes handled with tags)
    q. Layer 17: Land Zoning: park, farm, industrial, residential

    That's not saying to provide all the models but a subset of example models would be needed to tutor.

    Then it will be possible to create a simple behavioral AI based on all the classification(s) of all the relevant layers the character(s) location coordinates indicates they are in. If they are at the airport then they are picking up someone or something, flying somewhere, or flying a plane themselves. Other activities at an airport will cause security to react. If a character is given a goal, achieving that goal might require a change in behavior depending on the environment as defined by the layers and tags of the player's current location. Layers can overlap: airports have businesses in them. waterways have businesses on them.

    It's kind of integrating Unity's mecanim, layers, tags, & terrain systems with the concept of cartographic layers into making it easier to create a game environment and a type of pseudo AI. Unity's message system should update the character's 'brain' state with the layer & tag information so they can react accordingly if the information is relevant to the current goal. The character 'brain' can learn new things leading to new game play or practice, becoming better at things it already knows. Also, activity types as tagged by a mecanim state change can influence physical and mental health as in swimming and running versus desk activities. Engaging in cruel activities leads to reduction of mental health. Such things as those.

    It would make it much easier to create games but just as important make it immensely easier to 'translate' written educational books (and novels and mysteries if you like) into educational simulations.

    I haven't been comprehensive, walking and bike paths for example, but you get the gist.
     
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  23. goat

    goat

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    I tried but my PC is too old.
     
  24. Baldinoboy

    Baldinoboy

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    Yeah. UE4 kills my computer too. That is why I have not dug into the terrain also. It looks nice though.
     
  25. S4G4N

    S4G4N

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    Going to read through this and keep an eye here.
    I love terrain and it capabilities and what it gives to game and asset builders.
    With Unity 5 out and all that, is this being actively being worked on ?
     
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  26. darkhog

    darkhog

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    Keep hiring him as the plan B. If you'd hire him without buying his company, he'd have an incentive to make inferior "default" system, just to sell more of his company's product.
     
  27. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    I've been lied to one too many times to trust a tech demo reel at face value and reserve some skepticism until I can run it on my own box.
     
    Last edited: Apr 15, 2015
  28. S4G4N

    S4G4N

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    @Not_Sure
    I agree,

    Tech Demos are there to create Market Hype and spark interest, but by many seen as"this is what I am going to be able to do on my basic PC at home.

    With my own stuff I like giving web demos so that you can click, test and if you happy buy, becasue that is what you WILL be able to do with it
     
  29. Baldinoboy

    Baldinoboy

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    I know for sure those demos will not run decently on my machine. The art is one thing. For the kite demo they did an insane job with the art. The thing I want to see in a terrain is features and I have not used UE4 terrain so I have no idea if I want their terrain or not. So when @cakeslice said they should make it like UE4 I am assuming he used UE4 terrain. If not then it was just the shininess that caught the attention which I do agree is not right. @rea was just showing some tools from Snowdrop that most engines have that would be nice to have in Unity.
     
  30. TheSniperFan

    TheSniperFan

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    Stunning, but irrelevant.
    The question isn't how good it looks in pre-rendered trailers, but how much of a pain it was to create.
    On top of that, the terrain itself isn't impressive by any means. It's fairly easily created with tools like World Machine.

    You don't draw terrains like this with brushes. You generate them, then you use the brushes of your engine's terrain editor to make small tweaks like flattening a surface to place a house on.
    You'd have to be insane to draw all of this by hand.
     
  31. Baldinoboy

    Baldinoboy

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    I agree but it was not the actual terrain shape that was nice but the vegetaiton, rocks, and shading/lighting. All together on a large terrain is amazing.
     
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  32. goat

    goat

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    I created a better terrain in Unity with satellite data but only because people think the Matterhorn is awesome. If that's the topography of that part of NZ that's what it is. Old enough granite looks like that. What I couldn't do in Unity and what that long list I gave above desires to do is overlay rivers, lakes, glaciers, roads, rock types, animal & vegetative types on the landscape easily.

    And really, there is no reason why Unity can't implement a system of terrain overlays with their current terrain engine or generate a terrain with something like topographic elevation lines in addition to raw height maps. They'd need to only though in some pseudo-slope generation code to fill in the terrain between the elevation lines. The app developer could assign a polygonal degree of complexity that they don't wish the pseudo-slope terrain generator to exceed. The hard part is reading and accurately decoding the elevation lines but if the source data are already in a vector drawing language such as postscript than that part is not so hard anymore. If someone wanted an accurate depiction of the Matterhorn - fine they can still use a height map, otherwise they can use a topographic elevation line map.

    I've seen and used some of the 3rd party terrain generators and they really show the limits of the pseudo random generation algorithms they use. The real Earth has a much more varied and pleasing topography.
     
    Last edited: Apr 15, 2015
  33. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    You know what I'd like to see?

    It's so stupid and so simple, but I'd like to see the terrain raised half way by defualt so that I can start by digging down.
     
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  34. TheSniperFan

    TheSniperFan

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    @Not_Sure :eek:
    I'm literally speechless after reading this. Thinking that there was no way they haven't thought of this scenario, I actually opened up Unity just to be sure. I stand corrected.

    Seriously, no matter what they do in the new terrain system. This has to be implemented, simply on account of how absurdly obvious its usefulness would be.
    Either the way you said, by letting us specify the default height when creating a terrain or by adding a tool that allows us to move it up/down in its entirety.
     
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  35. FargleBargle

    FargleBargle

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    Actually, you can. Set the level brush to whatever height you want and paint the whole terrain with it at 100% opacity. Or just make a terrain based at zero altitude, and move it down to whatever depth you want after. I use this all the time for oceans and lakes, since I like to set sea level at zero. I'm not sure this needs to be added as a "feature" though since it's pretty easy to do if you need it, and an unnecessary complication if you don't. It's the same as saying "I want the pivot to be at the center of the terrain instead of the lower left corner". If you want your terrain centered at zero, just move it.
     
  36. davidsirmons

    davidsirmons

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    Trying desperately to create a game with spherical worlds, with zero success. Every promising method for this on the asset store is abandoned for some esoteric reason. Since it's probably one of the 3 most asked for things in Unity land, it might be a good idea to include a method of some kind, along with procedural displacement and GPU texturing.
     
  37. ippdev

    ippdev

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    Load a 50% grey heightmap to start. No big deal.
     
  38. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    We spent 4 months research on terrain for our open world game and have found that every single time, meshes both looked better and by far performed better. Naturally, much harder to author. Voxels aren't very good for terrains unless in addition somehow, because you end up with stair stepping from say, marching cubes, even if rounded you can't get forms you like.
     
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  39. Jither

    Jither

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    Thank you, hippocoder, for saying that. Been thinking this for months when looking at this thread, but didn't really want to rain on the voxel celebration parade - me being a relative Unity newbie, although I've been dealing with various voxel-y concepts in code in non-Unity projects for a few decades now.

    I personally don't really care for voxel terrains for those reasons - for terrains, either the costs or the lack of flexibility far outweigh the benefits.

    On a related note, I also don't care about turning Unity into a full-fledged terrain generator. Why reinvent the wheel? As long as it can import from tools that will always be better suited for the task anyway (which it already can - although improvements could be made there, in terms of workflow). It needs sculpting/painting tools to make adjustments when putting everything together, and that's about it. Just as I don't expect it to replace Max/Maya/Modo/Blender/whatever as a modelling tool. Even if I could generate a realistic terrain directly in Unity, I wouldn't want to.

    The improvements that really matter (to me):
    • Performance, performance, performance
    • ... not least on larger terrains
    • Better support for larger terrains - streaming, origin reset to overcome floating point limitations etc...
    • Mesh blending and proper hole cutting support without jumping through hoops.
    • A much more open architecture in general - both for editor and runtime. At the moment, too much - not least for terrain details, trees etc. - is limited by the ancient terrain engine. No third party code can fix it because it's deeply ingrained into the internals. Mesh alignment ("floating grass"), real time shadowing, tree performance, LOD, etc. etc.
    Basically, any time Tomasz Stobierski, larsbertram1 or Nathaniel Doldersum says "can't do it" or "that would be quite a challenge", it needs to be looked into. ;)

    So, my priority list for work on the engine is pretty obvious:

    1. Anything that cannot be implemented by a third party, because engine internals get in the way.
    2. Anything that could be implemented by third party but might take several months at least (i.e. stuff that would tend to cost above $100 on asset store) or would require strange hacks to work half the time.
    ...
    10. Anything that could easily be implemented by third party in a few hours or days. Making as much as possible fall into this category is part of priority 1. ;)
     
  40. Reanimate_L

    Reanimate_L

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    This....mostly this.....come on unity....come on...
     
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  41. Baldinoboy

    Baldinoboy

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    Man thank you for saying this. Also thank you @hippocoder. Voxel is cool but I really do not care for it. I would rather a terrain with great features than an expensive(on the computer) terrain that all the time working on it was spent making it a featureless voxel terrain. Cryengine has a great voxel cave system. It is simple and not too expensive. I created pretty wicked caves with that but still they will never look as good as just making a cave in a modeling program. That is why I mainly just want a terrain hole system built in.

    I understand people want to do things like 7DTD but there are things you can buy that would be worth it if that is going to be a big part of your game.
     
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  42. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Another danger is relying heavily on triplanar. The thought of a triplanar shader sampling that many times for pbs makes my spine tingle with flagellative possibilities. So that's also a worry.
     
  43. hopeful

    hopeful

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    I haven't worked with terrain at all yet ... as I hear the horror stories and I'm basically hoping it gets improved before I get there. ;)

    But if mesh looks better than Unity terrain and is more performant - which is what I keep hearing - and if voxels allow for better 3D sculpting in the editor, then isn't the proper path to have something like a voxel-based terrain editor that bakes terrain into a mesh? In other words, something vaguely like ProBuilder, but for terrain?

    EDIT: Also, ideally you should be able to mark off a section of baked terrain and turn it into voxels for re-editing. Kind of like ProBuilder's "probuilderize" feature, which can turn a mesh into a ProBuilder object so that ProBuilder can edit it.
     
    Last edited: Apr 18, 2015
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  44. MD_Reptile

    MD_Reptile

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    I'm a solo indie dev working on 2d mobile games, and I've never had a practical use for terrains yet, but if they supported overhangs I'd be impressed. Then of course some fast runtime editing, for removal and additions of chunks of terrain. As is a height map is not enough to do realistic destruction mechanics with the terrain unity has.

    There's my thoughts.
     
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  45. Gekigengar

    Gekigengar

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    Yeah, just like this new GI.

    I am having headache with all the rendering problem it has on mobile devices.
     
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  46. TheSniperFan

    TheSniperFan

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    While this works, it's really nothing but a workaround for a problem that shouldn't be there to begin with, don't you think so?

    Create new terrain > Type in default height > Confirm.
    It's so simple, works independent of resolution, allows for arbitrary values and doesn't require you to have a placeholder heightmap with the desired height and in the desired resolution lying around on your hard disk.
     
  47. ippdev

    ippdev

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    I have done a few dozen huge terrains and it never occurred to me that the starting parameters were a problem. My issue was always with the tiling of textures showing up.
     
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  48. TheSniperFan

    TheSniperFan

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    They »could« be a "problem". Why raise 90% of your terrain, if you could just lower 10%? It's doing the same thing, just way more efficient.
     
  49. ippdev

    ippdev

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    Because that would leave 90% unsculpted and being an anal retentive fine arts trained artist I could never do that.
     
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  50. TheSniperFan

    TheSniperFan

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    Those were hypothetical numbers. What I wanted to say that there are these two ways of achieving the same terrain and sometimes one is faster, sometime the other one is.
    Given that it's not particularly hard to implement, why not do it?
     
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