Question Open world map - creating, chunking, streaming workflow

Hey! I'm struggling a lot to figure out what to do, I simply can't find any guides on the matter. It seems like everyone just uses Sectr/World Streamer for this kind of stuff, but I don't have the money for that.

I'm trying to build an open world game. Don't worry, it's a 2.5D top-down low poly game, I'm not trying to recreate GTA. I want it to be open world simply to connect the areas more interestingly. But I have no idea where to start!

1. How to create the terrain? I tried using Unity's terrain system, but I had a significantly better experience in Blender, having the flexibility of playing around with vertices. What do I do then? Create multiple small planes in Blender to form a big map, sculpt the terrain there, and then write a script to export it as a heightmap so that I can paint it as a Terrain in Unity? That sounds super convoluted... any other recommendations?
2. How to chunk/stream the Terrain? It's pretty easy to just write naïve code that will enable/disable the terrain chunks that Unity's terrain system separates, based on the distance to the player. But what's correct way to do this? I also need to take into account all the other meshes that I'll import, NPCs and such. There seems to be a nice way to handle this via sub-scenes, but I really don't wanna mess with ECS. Any ideas?

Also worth noting that I need extra control over the vertices (I think?) in order to create slopes and such, like in the example below. I absolutely cannot replicate this in Unity's terrain system. Also worth pointing out that since the game is top-down, I 100% don't care about LOD.



Sorry for asking so much and being so clueless... I can always just google my way through this kind of thing, but in this case, I can't find anything regarding a free workflow for creating, chunking and streaming terrain for an open world game in Unity. Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

Listen, if your serious about your project, you really need Sectr (my choice), or World Streamer. Chunk streaming that terrain is the only way in that case. And to be honest, if you think that you can dev a game without spending some money, specially now a days, your sadly mistaken.

You have to have a good workflow for your project, and that includes time. Assets kill time, alot of the assets are there, and save you a butt load of time. Sure you can code it yourself, but why, when good assets have already coded it, and probably, better than you could have...

 

That image you show is very trivial and easily created with Unity's Terrain Tools. I rather suggest before you go open world, chunks, streaming etc you figure out the engine you're working with.