TerraLand - Photorealistic Terrains From Heightmaps Satellite Images [RELEASED]

TerraLand 3 Is Here, Click & Move On!​

GET It Now for Only $25 from terraunity.com​

TerraLand plugin contains of multiple components which use GIS data & coordinates to load & create Photo-Realistic Terrain from any part of the Earth within a few clicks.

The package is Unity 5.x & Unity 4.x compatible.

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Featuring TerraLand Tournament Demo Scene

TerraLand Tournament Is A Driving Simulator In The Desert of White Rim Trail, Utah, USA.


Wanna Try The Game...! Click Here


The Game Can Be Played In 3 Modes of Race, Free Ride & Tour With 3 Vehicles Types of ATV, DPV & SUV Which Have Customized Physics, Sounds & Behaviors.


Full Source Code & Project Files Will Be Available To TerraLand Customers

Already A Customer? Login To Your Account On terraunity.com & Download Project Files


TerraLand Tournament Discussion Thread

TERRALAND DOWNLOADER​

Link To Tutorial Sections

• Intro
• Package Importing
• Loading Component
• Defaults Testing
• OFFLINE DATA
• Downloads Folder
• NEW TERRAIN SETTINGS
• AREA SELECTION
• AREA SIZE
• INTERACTIVE MAP
• HEIGHTMAP DOWNLOADER
• SAVE ELEVATION DATA
• Loading ASCII in Global Mapper
• SATELLITE IMAGE DOWNLOADER
• FAILED IMAGES DOWNLOADER
• PRESET MANAGEMENT
• TERRAIN BOUNDS
• OPTIONS
• Terrain Neighbors Script
• ENGINE RESOLUTION PRESETS
• Sample Environments by TerraLand

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Downloader​

Connects to Elevation & Satellite Imagery servers and download needed data for user defined area of interest along with many other options to adjust resolutions and other settings.

• Global Elevation & Satellite Imagery support for downloading
• Highest available Elevation data resolutions ranging from over 30 meters in most of the Earth areas to approximately 3 meters in some limited areas. More Info
• Highest available Satellite Imagery provides 1 meter or better Satellite and Aerial Imagery in many parts of the world & lower resolution satellite imagery worldwide. More Info
• Bathymetry data included to create above & below (negative values) sea-level heights mixed for the final heights. More Info
• Multi-Threading operations for faster & synchronous job handling
• Create, update & edit terrains right within the scene
• Multiple or single terrain chunk support for both Elevation & Satellite Imagery
• Built-in Geo-Coder to search any location on Earth
• Built-in interactive map for area selection & definition
• User-Friendly area definition by real-world metrics or geo-coordinates
• Heightmap/Elevation data downloader with complete resolution flexibility & other various options More Info
• Satellite Imagery downloader with lots of options to define resolution quality & import settings More Info
• Save Elevation & Imagery data for later usage in projects or external GIS software
• Can save elevation data in 3 formats of ASCII Grid, Raw & Tif along with projection (.proj) files
• Satellite Images will be saved in Jpeg format with compression quality modifier
• Automatic failed images downloader due to connection drops during the downloads
• Predefined resolution presets for elevation & imagery to automatically set final terrain quality
• Generated Terrain(s) can have up to 8192 heightmap resolution to override Unity's limitation and achieve high resolution terrain surfaces
• Each downloaded Satellite Image/Texture can have up to 4096 resolution and unlimited resolution for the entire terrain(s) as much as GPU can handle
• Elevation/Vertical Exaggeration modifier to set final heights. TerraLand automatically rescales terrains based on Real-World area size (value of 1)
• Preset Management to save any user adjustments made in the UI
• Run-Time "Terrain Neighbors" script to handle terrain neighboring during the gameplay

Terrain​

A collection of multiple operations needed for terrain management in the scene.

• Loads any previously downloaded elevation data files of ASCII, Raw & Tif
• Applies elevation data to new or existing terrains regardless of the data resolution or terrain(s) resolutions through complex resampling operations
• Sets terrain neighbors if lost or doesn’t exist at all for seamless LOD & Tessellation between terrain chunks
• Splits selected single terrain to the user defined grid size
• Smoothen out terrain heights if there are jagged edges on the surface
• Exports elevation data in 2 formats of ASCII & RAW from the selected terrain(s)
• Image Tiler which takes a folder containing satellite images in project and textures corresponding terrain(s) More Info
• Terrain To Mesh converts selected terrain(s) to mesh and optionally places it in the scene
• Mesh To Terrain takes a 3D model/mesh and outputs a terrain with selected resolution in the scene
• Converts DMS (Degree, Minute, Second) to DD (Decimal Degrees) coordinate systems and vice versa

MapsMaker​

A newly introduced component to do image processing on satellite images and maps. It takes a satellite image and outputs 3 map types of Shadowless map, Colormap & LandCover (Splatmap).

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• Shadow Remover can remove shadows from the Satellite Images through complex image processing operations
• Colormap Generator can remove small details from the Satellite Image and generates a colormap
• LandCover Generator Filters top used colors in the image and generate a landcover/splatmap from the image

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It seems really cool for serious games, great job!

 

Thanks for the support kenshin.

 

TerraLand is now on Asset Store: TerraLand Asset Store

 

A shame the trees and clouds are baked in, it looks good on the surface but breaks down when you get closer. I can see this being much nicer for planets and such

 

Usually satellite images which data sources produce are cleared from clouds and captured when the sky is clear and sunny. In TerraLand's online demo which you can check it in the 1st post, none of the 5 textures include clouds in them, those clouds you see in the screenshots are particles.

Also the next version of TerraLand comes with a new component "Terrain Enhancer" which includes a special shader to create a hybrid terrain containing of a satellite image as the base and colormap plus 4 tiling images as detailmaps to represent different environment areas such as rock, sand, grass and etc. in close distances based on a triplanar projection.

However using the above mentioned shader solves a lot of unnecessary subjects from terrain textures, you can still populate your terrain by 3D items to put everything (trees, buildings, streets and ...) in their real place and create realistic scenes. Check out our 2 other products TerraTrees TerraCity and check the online demos or download the project scenes from here to see what can be achieved in action together with TerraLand in Unity Terra +3.

 

Interesting stuff.
How well does this work for close up things? I'm looking to create stuff for a race game. Getting accurate results of locations such as Trollstigen(Norway mountainroad) and landscape(height etc, not the buildings) in the center of San Francisco is very important to me.

 

Having details in close up views is completely depending on your own setup and number of asset items.

Talking about natural landscapes which involves terrain heights, terrain textures and vegetation without needing to create complex scenes like urban areas that include buildings and such, I can say that you can achieve as much as detailed you are looking for to get a realistic scene, of course if you have good looking assets.

There is no limitation in either TerraLand which obtains the latest public global elevation data available from NASA (Manually in the current version) or TerraTrees which manages your terrain vegetation giving you a lot of options to place trees using geographical or user created maps. The next version of TerraTrees will also support the placement of terrain details (grass, detail meshes such as rock).

Lastly, there are 2 occasions based on your game/scene type, top views close up views. If player can navigate in both distances at the same time so this is the most difficult case as you have to keep a lot of assets viewable from far distances as FOV covers a big area while still having so much details on the terrain surface not to break the visuals in the close up view distances. This case needs a lot of LODing and generally Optimizations involved.
For race type games, as the player is always on the ground, so you only need to keep your details on the ground and around the race way. I'm not willing to go into details as you may know them better, just wanted to rewrite some general tips.

Also as we already mentioned in the forums, we are going to release a new product which generate roads and streets from OSM data in the upcoming months so stay tuned with us and register on our website.

 

Thank you for the reply

I am not looking for a 1 click solution that places everything for me, but having the correct land height as detailed as possible would help a lot and save a tremendous amount of work.
The game would be a close-up view behind the car (think NFS, GT, Forza etc).

I really want the locations to be as accurate as can be, which is why I was looking at a solution such as this
It would be very useful especially for mountain areas, as getting the correct height values for such a track is a huge part of such a location.
I simply wondered how accurate the terrain ends up being. I tried checking the live demo on your website and the land is pretty bumpy at the area where it looks like there should be a road.
Judging from this, it may not be accurate enough (or need lots of adjusting) to be used as a source for tracks.
Any clarification on that part would be highly appreciated.

Either way, I'll keep tracking this and your upcoming plugin, sounds interesting

 

As mentioned before, the elevation data is the most accurate public data available. The SRTM data is available as 3 arc second (approx. 90m resolution) DEMs globally and 1 arc second (approx. 30m resolution) in USA and some other countries. The vertical error of the DEM’s is reported to be less than 16m.

Here what you are concerning about is called the "Elevation Exaggeration" (Vertical Height Factor) which represents the value of generated heights in our terrain. I'm starting to think that we have chosen a wrong location for our simulation demos as it's a special shaped valley which everyone thinks it's unreal and so much bumpy. check out the attached zip file and open the included kmz file in Google Earth to see that this place really exists the way it is in demos.

By default, Terraland will generate terrain heights with elevation exaggeration value of 1 which means the heights are as they are in real world and there are no extra ups and downs in the heights, this vertical factor that is equal to Terrain Height (y scale) in Unity terrain's "Set Resolution" settings is easily adjustable to any value which you may wish for in order to rise or lower the whole terrain heights.

But what matters here is that because even the highest resolution is approximately 30 meters and we are limited to this data for the heights, so the land is not that smooth to correctly place road segments on it. The best workaround to this issue is that you have to flatten the heightmap of terrain below your road segments so there won't be any unusual bumpiness where there are roads, streets or tracks.

 

Great, thank you for the clarification

 

Since the downloader does not work atm, what options do I have to download data manually using http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/ ?
As in, what files does Terra Unity accept for importing height data. GeoTiff? Img? ArcGrid?

Terraland is useless for me, if it can not download, or important any files from there. I am fine with downloading them manually. But for that I have to know which files I have to download/can download and Import into Unity.

My Current Process of downloading GeoTiff data from the Nationalmapviewer, putting that into 3Dem and then exporting that to Terragen and exporting from Terragen to Unity is just too much hassle. Besides that, I can only use GeoTiff in 3Dem which is not available everywhere in the US...

 

Below is a quick tutorial about importing and exporting a heightmap using SRTM 4.1 and Global Mapper to prepare it for your project in Unity using TerraLand plugin. No need to mention that you can still do a lot of other things to setup your data in Global Mapper.

• Go to http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/SELECTION/inputCoord.asp
• Select area of interest by available options and export either GeoTiff or ArcInfo ASCII files which are compressed zip files
• Import downloaded zip file in Global Mapper
• In Global Mapper change the shader to "Gradient Shader"
• In Global Mapper disable "Hill Shading"
• Each downloaded heightmap tile in SRTM 4.1 covers 5 x 5 girds of Latitude Longitude geographical coordinates
• Each downloaded heightmap tile's resolution in SRTM 4.1 is 6000 x 6000 pixels
• As maximum heightmap resolution in Unity is 4096 so we have to make a selection in loaded data, one advantage of working with raster data is to change the resolutions as desired. A workaround is to export all loaded data which will be mentioned in the next steps, then open it in image editing programs such as Photoshop and resize it to 4097 which gives about 0.7 of the original resolution. Another way is to resize it to 6147 and chunk it up to 3 x 3 grids which gives us 9 image tiles of 2049 to export, in this case we have about 0.02 of data loss in resolution. If you need more accurate results for your export continue with next steps.
• There are 2 ways to select an area in your loaded data, one is to Create Area by "Digitizer Tool" and the other is Gridding option upon export settings.
• Using Digitizer Tool, right click and select "Create Area/Polygon Features" then one of these options as you desire: "Create Rectangular/Square Area", "Create Rectangular/Square Area (Specify Coordinates)" "Create Square Areas of Fixed Ground Area". You can then use Digitizer Tool to move your Created Area. From the top menu select File -> Export -> Export Raster/Image Format -> select BIL/BIP/BSQ File format -> in "Options" tab select "Grayscale Imagery" in Format section -> in "Export Bounds" tab select "Crop to Selected Area Feature(s)".
• Using Export Options, from the top menu select File -> Export -> Export Raster/Image Format -> select BIL/BIP/BSQ File format -> in "Options" tab select "Grayscale Imagery" -> in Format section in "Gridding" tab select "Specify Individual Grid Cell Pixel Size" and insert desired resolution which is a power of 2 + 1 number.
• When your data has been exported just change its format from ".bil" to ".raw" by renaming the file. This is the ordinary .raw file which you can open in image editing softwares to apply final changes if needed to finally export a 16 bit .raw image file.
• After applying editings on your .raw heightmap if needed, import it in your project in Unity. Bring up TerraLand-Terrain and drag drop the heightmap file in "HEIGHTMAP" field in "TERRAIN GENERATOR" section. The rest of the procedure is based on your settings for the generating terrain.

Because SRTM DEM files doesn't contain Bathymetric data so normally when you import downloaded DEM files in Global Mapper, there are void areas in the data where there is big water areas (such as oceans, seas big rivers) and this will cause height representation color issues when you export a part of data. Whatever color that is set as the background in Global Mapper, considers to be the elevation and it's wrong, so if it's white you may end up with the highest elevation in void (water) areas. You can set the background color to black or whatever grayish color but again in the end you won't get exact results even after struggling with the colors. The above mentioned tutorial and steps work correctly if there aren't any void areas in data.


I have to inform you that because of the high demand in the recent days, there will be a Beta version available for the ones who has purchased the current version of TerraLand and not to mention that when you have this beta version you don't need to go through above mentioned steps and you will easily end up with a terrain that is automatically generated with correct shape and heights only by choosing a center point location and a few clicks to set up desired settings.

For more info about the beta version please register on our site and when you purchase the current version, we will send you the beta one.

 

Hey TerrUnity,

thank you for your quick response. Thats great, I am sure I can live with that workflow, its not ideal, but atleast we can get the data into the game
When do you expect your Beta to launch?

 

You are welcome, let us know if you encounter any problems. The Beta version will be ready in about 3 days.

 

Looking forward to it.

 

Hi,
how is the Beta coming along?

 

Sorry for the late reply. The beta version is already released and will be sent upon request for the people who purchased current TerraLand version form our webstore. Here are some info about this plugin.

The GUI and features are going to be improved a lot. Everything in GUI is simple and straight to easily get a photorealistic terrain of desired location. It was never easier than this before.

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Quick Guide

Heightmap Downloader

• Load the "Terrain Generator" from Unity's Terrain menu
• Create a new Terrain and drag drop it in Terrain filed of Terrain Generator
• Select a point on Earth and insert Geo-Coordinates (Decimal Degrees) of that point in LATITUDE LONGITUDE fields (For example you can search the names of world's famous locations in Google and add "lat long" at the end of your keyword to get its Geo-Coordinates)
• Select the Size of the Terrain which will be altered
• Select the Resolution of the generating terrain to adjust the covering area (Changing resolution won't affect terrain quality as elevation data resolution is always the same, instead it specifies terrain area's boundaries and metrics. You can see Top, Left, Bottom Right coordinates of terrain boundaries and also the covering area size in real world)
• Check POWER OF TWO to generate the terrain in proper square size or uncheck this option to specify an arbitrary non power of two value of resolution (As most Terrain Systems including Unity need PO2 heightmap resolutions to properly generate terrain, it's recommended to leave this option checked, however if you don't want the resolution to be a PO2 you will end up with flat zero height areas on your terrain)
• Check "GENERATE FROM CENTER OF TILE" to generate the terrain from the center of the downloaded elevation data regardless of inserted coordinates in Latitude/Longitude fields (Sometimes the location you choose is near topmost, leftmost, bottommost or rightmost of the downloaded data, in this case when you press "GENERATE TERRAIN" button, it first analyses terrain bounds to see if it exists in the data. If it's out of bounds you will be notified by a warning and terrain generation will be stopped. You either have to change specified location or check this option to take data's center point as our specified point)
• Select server type for the downloading data (The "HTTP" "FTP" servers are natively hosted by NASA)
• You can set the cache folder for downloading elevation data inside a folder in your project so that Terrain Generator can read write the data in that location (By default the cache folder is Assets/TerraLand/Cache)
• When you are satisfied with the settings you have made, press "DOWNLOAD DATA" button to start downloading of elevation data (You will be notified if needed data is already available in the specified cache folder)
• When you have your elevation data ready, press "GENERATE TERRAIN" and the terrain will be generated based on your specified settings
• Turn on "EDIT TERRAIN HEIGHTS" option to change the whole terrain heights in real-time (Using this option on terrains with usually more than 1024 resolution will cause Unity to slow down so take cautions about this. Heights will be updated only when the mouse pointer is on the Elevation slider or field)

Satellite Image Downloader

• Select the resolution of the downloading Satellite Image
• Press "GET SATELLITE IMAGE" to start downloading of the terrain area's satellite image based on specified settings and it will automatically texture the terrain when the image is downloaded

Mount Vesuvius generated using TerraLand

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Our next scheduled update for TerraLand will be the "Terrain Enhancer" component which has been introduced before.

 

Hello

What are the source and max resolution of the satellite images?
Asking about the source because I would need to inspect the quality of the area I'm interested in.

Thanks!

 

The source of global satellite imagery in TerraLand is ESRI which obtains its data from multiple resources.

For full details on the coverage, view the list of World Imagery Map Contributors.



Note: We have been asked so many times about TerraLand satellite imagery source and its copyrights. As you know many plugins and softwares use Bing or Google Maps as their imagery source for publishing and offline data usage which is illegal unless you own a premium license. Obviously the data isn't free as they spend a lot of money on capturing them and apparently they provide much better imagery resolution for some areas in comparison to ESRI overall while ESRI has better quality in some areas also.

We have chosen ESRI because it's a public service, of course it's holding its copyrights but provided in a more public and free to use condition.

Similar question has been answered in World Imagery" - can I use it? and as you see because ESRI uses multiple data sources so it's hard to tell the exact condition in different areas.

Also TerraLand takes the downloaded image as the base a "reference" texture for terrain colormap used in far viewing distances and then by mixing it with "TerraLand-Enhancer" you add repetitive image tiles to bring details as the final visuals. This reference image can also be a Topo Map.



However, if you can prepare your own satellite images for the area of interest you can still use TerraLand-Maps to texture your terrain and place satellite images in their real world positions as described in TerraLand Maps Introduction. Check out the Online Help section of our website to explore products' capabilities.


The Beta version has improved a lot and is continuing, some of the new features right within TerraLand GUI are as follows:

• Search any address or location on Earth for terrain generation
• Get geo-coordinates (Latitude/Longitude) of the searching location
• Get Address of the inserted geo-coordinates
• Image Preview of specified location for up to 1024 resolution from Google Maps
• ASCII grid file reader for loading customized user created elevation data files
• Preset Management to save load specified settings

For some reason I can't give any screenshots for now here in forums but you can get the plugin as soon as your purchase made.

 

Thanks for the information! Awesome

 

Nice. This is exactly what we needed Will buy it soon Thanks alot.

 

@gigolo You are welcome.

@Olafson Glad you like this. Buy any products you wish directly from our website and after your purchase we will send you the beta package.

 

Hello there. I have just purchased TerraLand from your website using my profile (nicokamps@freenet.de). I would really like to try out the beta. Would you be able to provide me the download link?

 

Very impressive! Do you have downloadable demo for mac?

I'm having some serious issues with webplayer (your demo is not the only one) ..total crash and automatic reboot after loading is done. I guess there is something wrong with graphic card.. but that has only happened with webplayer so far, so if you have normal app for mac, i suppose it could work.

 

@Olafson Thanks for your purchase. Please send us an email including your Paypal Transaction ID through info(at)terraunity(dot)com and we will send you the beta package to your email address.

 

@chelnok Yes, we have project demos for each product in unitypackage format which can be downloaded from Download page of our website here: http://terraunity.com/download/page.aspx under "Other Files" section.

You can register on our site and contact us for more info about products and releases.

 

Some servers dont like unitypackage files with their default settings. If thats the case, easy fix would be zip them.

 

Thanks for pointing that out, yes that's true but we already had set our server MIME type settings to accept .unitypackage files and there is no problem with other packages, seems like there was an uploading problem with them, they will be available soon.

 

Project Demos are available again for download from our website: http://terraunity.com/download/page.aspx

TerraLand Demo Project: http://terraunity.com/download/fileid/1746997991/page.aspx

TerraTrees Demo Project: http://terraunity.com/download/fileid/423377002/page.aspx

TerraCity Demo Project: http://terraunity.com/download/fileid/75868152/page.aspx

Please confirm if the links are ok.

 

TerraLand Downloader Beta 1.3 now covers some major updates including unlimited number of downloading and texturing of satellite images on terrain.


New Features:

• Unlimited Downloading Texturing of Satellite Images based on grid size
• Loading of Custom ASCII elevation files with resolution of up to 8192 (will be higher in next updates)
• "RESET TERRAIN" command to reset terrain heights to its last original generated shape under "OTHER SETTINGS" section (If you have edited terrain shape using brushes or anything else, pressing this button will reset terrain shape to its initial form)
• Save Satellite Images in separate folders under main "SATELLITE IMAGES" folder in project (folder naming is based on download date and image naming is based on grid cell position)
• "IMAGE TILER" to texture terrain using specified folder's available satellite images which are downloaded using TerraLand Downloader or any other ways (image tiles ordering from Top-Left to Bottom-Right, Pressing "GUESS" will automatically adopt grid size for texturing)
• Better memory management (Terrain editing operations are so heavy, TerraLand is lighter now to avoid Unity "Out Of Memory" crashes)
• Better accuracy for matching Satellite Images with Terrain heights

Screenshot below shows a terrain inside Unity which has been generated and textured using TerraLand Downloader Beta. 64 satellite images with resolution of 2048 (total of 16k resolution in a 8x8 grid) has been automatically downloaded and tiled on terrain.

​

 

As we had good feedback about TerraLand Downloader Beta version, so we are moving to the stage for creating "Terrain Enhancer" component. Below are screenshots of our custom terrain shader which can connect to Terrain Enhancer to automatically paint unlimited detail textures on your terrain based on the colormap pixel colors.

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Terrain Shader Features:

• 8192 resolution colormap (2x2 grid of 4 Satellite Images in 4096 resolution)
• Unlimited detail textures painting on terrain all with normalmaps and heightmaps
• Blending between colormap layer and detail textures based on specified distance and blending amount
• Blending between far viewing and close up normalmaps
• Steep Parallax Mapping with amount and quality modifiers
• POM self shadowing with amount and quality modifiers
• Lighten/Darken Scattering for more natural visuals on detail textures
• Global tileable Normalmap for boosting far viewing distance details
• Terrain Specular Shininess
• Brightness modifier for the whole terrain rendering
• More realistic rendering of images textures colors
• Procedural Snow layer with slope detection and starting height option
• Snow Fader for smooth gradient transition density
• Satellite Image Correction to add snow to detected snow parts in satellite images
• Normals Strength modifier

This shader will be included in TerraLand 2 but if you are in a hurry contact us.

 

Hi, I have some questions about the licencing of the data used in your product, which I'm hoping you can clear up for me:

Firstly, I noticed you stated that the source for global elevation data was NASA's SRTM 4.1. I've previously looked at using SRTM data as the basis for heightmaps in my Unity projects but, while it's easily available and free to download, I could only ever find it licenced for free/academic use. Indeed, the readme file accompanying all the downloads I could find states "Users are prohibited from any commercial, non-free resale, or redistribution"
Can you confirm that terrains generated with terraland are licenced to use SRTM data in commercial applications?

Secondly, on the previous page, you stated "We have chosen ESRI because it's a public service, of course it's holding its copyrights but provided in a more public and free to use condition. ". That seems to be in conflict with the ESRI Licence Agreement, Section 4.2, which states you may not "Distribute Software, Data, or Online Services to third parties, in whole or in part" http://www.esri.com/~/media/Files/Pdfs/legal/pdfs/e204_e300.pdf

So, can you guarantee that developers can create commercial Unity applications using data downloaded using Terraland?

 

Sorry for my late reply,

NASA SRTM 4.1 is a public free data source, we never resale or redistribute their data, our product prices are all based on the part for converting data and 3D generation not the data itself. TerraLand can directly access these sources and simply create a work space for the users to work with these data files. So no matter if you generate terrains out of that data using TerraLand or any other programs or by yourself in a commercial application, there is no licensing issues as you don't resale or redistribute the data.

About ESRI, we agree that it's a bit more complicated and there is no exact Yes/No for the copyrights as mentioned before and also the Licence Agreement which we have seen that before too is a general reminder for the whole data. The condition is again the same as above and prices are based on the plugin generation capabilities only. If you insist on a specific area which you are worried about its copyrights, we suggest to firstly contact the developer and whenever the permission is granted, you can use TerraLand to download that area's satellite imagery.

Again these agreements are mostly for a guarantee that users must know that they are prohibited from reselling or redistributing those data files as they are collected from many different sources.

 

i am interested in combining your system with one that would allow a player to walk all the way around the earth if they wanted to.. any suggestions?
i dont mind if the game data is 150gb+

 

We are trying to integrate such an option to cover the entire planet using streaming terrain chunks and procedural noises for the enhancement and these options will be released in the upcoming TerraLand version 2. So you can stay connected until we make it available in our package or use TerraLand to create terrain chunks and then set them up in your own streaming system.

Up to now, our plugins only work in edit time but we are preparing some run-time scripts to automatically manage huge projects by asynchronous operations on scenes.

Also this option is a priority for us because we have a request from a known big company which uses our plugins and some of the requested features from our customers such as this one will be included in our future public releases.

 

Hi,

I need to create on part of the terrain from india. is it possible?.
if

where i will get the terrain high maps?

 

You can create terrains from any part of the Earth including India. The source for elevation (heightmap) data is NASA SRTM 4.1 and for satellite imagery data is ESRI. You can then enhance terrain heights using natural noises and also enhance textures and maps using our custom terrain shader to get the ultimate details on terrains.

 

Hello,
your tool looks really good.
I downloaded your demo and I saw that there is a sample scene where you can browse through the geographic coordinates. I was just wondering, you can do so for a portion of land created?
For example, if I create the terrain of a portion of Italy, this is georeferenced and can navigate through coordinates? ?
Do you plan to add a feature for importing georeferenced shapefiles?
It is possible to create land by ASCII GRID files .asc or .xyz personal?

 

Yes, any portion of the map/terrain can be geo-referenced, as you said in the example scene of Earth, user can navigate through the entire planet and insert arbitrary coordinates to fly to. In this scene, Latitude goes from 90 to -90 and Longitude goes from -180 to 180, so we can limit these numbers to any values to match with desired terrain area boundaries and update current coordinates based on player position.

We were looking to add this feature from a long time ago but priorities matter though.

Currently TerraLand Downloader can load any ASCII grid files and generate terrains from this data.

 

Any proper tutorials please?

 

We are going to release the version 2 of TerraLand soon and new tutorial files and media will be there as soon as it's available, here are the current links to help and documentation files:

Documentaion Download & Online Help

http://terraunity.com/download/page.aspx
http://terraunity.com/online-help/page.aspx
http://terraunity.com/faq.aspx

You can also ask any questions here or directly from our website through the contact form or this emails address "info(at)terraunity.com".

Regarding the latest beta version of the TerraLand Downloader here are the needed info to get you started:

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TerraLand Downloader Quick Guide (As Seen In GUI)

Heightmap Downloader

• Load the "Terrain Generator" from Unity menu. Tools => TerraUnity => TerraLand Downloader
• Create a new Terrain and drag & drop it in Terrain field at the top of TerraLand Downloader
• Search any address or location on Earth and press "GET COORDINATES" and then press "SET LOCATION" to assign center point of generation
• You can also manually insert Geo-Coordinates (Decimal Degrees) of a point in LATITUDE & LONGITUDE fields as center point for terrain generation(For example you can type the names of any places in Google and add "lat long" at the end of your searched keyword to get its Geo-Coordinates)
• Optionally you can have an In-GUI image preview of the location by adjusting Zoom Level & Resolution and Pressing "PREVIEW LOCATION"

Terrain Generator

• Select the Resolution of the generating terrain by Area Size slider which specifies the covering area size (Changing resolution won't affect terrain quality as elevation data resolution is always the same, instead it specifies terrain area's boundaries and metrics. You can see the covering area size in real world)
• Set ELEVATION EXAGGERATION or Vertical factor of the whole terrain heights before terrain generation (value of 1 is approximately the real-world heights, please refer to the guide's final note statement)
• Create a scene if you haven't done that already (However if you forget to do this step accidentally, Unity will ask you to do so after data downloading in the next step)
• When you are satisfied with the settings you have made, press "DOWNLOAD DATA" button to start downloading of elevation data (You will be notified if needed data is already available in the specified cache folder)
• After finishing of data downloading using the above step, press "GENERATE TERRAIN" and the terrain will be generated based on the specified settings in your project scene

The downloaded data will be placed in folder "Cache" under "TerraLand" directory in your project as a zip file. You can change this folder for downloading elevation data files from going to "Options" tab in the top right of TerraLand GUI and select "SET CACHE FOLDER" to change its location. You may know that after the terrain has been generated you can delete downloaded zip files or copy them somewhere else for later use to make your project file size smaller.

Note: Under "DOWNLOAD DATA" button there is a checkbox called "EXTERNAL DOWNLOADER", when you enable this option, after you press button "Download Data" TerraLand will open a window in your default browser and starts to download needed heightmap data using your browser and outside Unity. This is going to have so much faster download speed than in-engine downloading. The only extra step is that, when the downloading has been finished, you should copy and paste this downloaded zip file in the above mentioned "Cache" folder in order to be detected by TerraLand.

Whether your data has been downloaded from engine or external browser and data is placed in the Cache folder, automatically data will be detected and now you can press "GENERATE TERRAIN" and terrain heights will be generated in selected terrain based on your settings (e.g. Area Size).


Custom ASCII Data Loader

You can generate terrains using your own elevation data files. After inserting the terrain in "TERRAIN" field, You simply need to insert your exported data (which must be in a power of 2 plus 1 resolution in .asc format) in "CUSTOM ASCII" field, press "ANALYZE DATA" and then hit "GENERATE TERRAIN" to start generating terrain heights based on your custom data. ASCII LOADER can also read and generate terrains from Bathymetry (Below sea-level/zero-point) elevation data files.


Terrain Splitter

Whenever the terrain heights is created and is selected in GUI, simply select "TILES GRID" size if you want the created base terrain to be split into multiple chunks/gameobjects (e.g. value of 4x4 splits the terrain into 4 by 4 grid cells which is 16 terrain objects in total) and press button "GENERATE TERRAIN TILES" so that a new gameobject will be created in hierarchy and has split terrain chunks in it as its children.

TERRAIN CHUNKS field is for the gameobject created in the above step as the parent for created terrain objects. Whenever TERRAIN CHUNKS gameobject is selected, the SATELLITE IMAGE DOWNLOADER will operate on all terrain chunks and whenever it is not selected, it will operate on the single terrain selected in the TERRAIN field as before. In "Satellite Image Downloader", below the Earth icon, there is a green box indicating number of loaded terrains whether it's a single terrain available or there are multiple of them.

When you press "GENERATE TERRAIN TILES", the main base terrain will be disabled in the scene/hierarchy and new copies of terrain chunks will be enabled and automatically inserted in "TERRAIN CHUNKS" field to continue texturing on them. You can then switch between them and enable/disable game objects.


Satellite Image Downloader

• Specify "Grid Size Per Terrain" for the downloading satellite image(s)
• Select the "Image Resolution" of the downloading Satellite Image(s)
• Select the "Image Quality Compression" of the downloading Satellite Image(s)
• "Import Compression" option to operate/bypass image compression through texture importer settings (Leave this option disabled for faster file importing & processing, you can then compress any texture files if you wish for file size reduction)
• "Auto Image Scaling" option to operate/bypass automatic image scaling to a square size while generating textures from downloaded data (Leave this option disabled for faster file importing & processing, enabling this option is not recommended as it won't make any advantages to texture rendering)
• "Anisotropic" modifier while importing satellite images
• "Alphamap Per Terrain" modifier to set each terrain's splatmap resolution (The higher this value is, the better texture blending will happen but increases memory usage)
• "Async Calls" modifier to set maximum asynchronous calls to the web service (Reduce this value if you have poor internet connection so that there are fewer service call failures)
• "Texture Terrain" option to automatically texture the terrain when the satellite images are downloaded. By turning this option off, the downloaded images will only be saved in the project for later use. Images folders will be located under "Satellite Images" folder and named by download date.
• Press "GET SATELLITE IMAGES" to start downloading of the terrain(s) area's satellite image(s) based on specified settings

Failed Downloads
If Image Downloader finished downloading of images and there are "Not Downloaded" images existing in your terrain textures, simply drag & drop created images folder (located under TerraLand/SatelliteImages/... directory) in "Failed Images Folder" field and by pressing "GET FAILED IMAGES" TerraLand Downloader will automatically starts to download previously failed downloaded images and textures your terrain(s).

Image Tiler
Drag & drop the folder that contains previously downloaded satellite images (whether by TerraLand or not) in "Tile Images Folder" field and after pressing "IMAGE TILER", the terrain will be textured with all available images under the specified folder.



Top Left Tabs in GUI


Preset Management
Preset Management to save & load all specified settings in TerraLand Downloader for later use


Terrain Bounds
Terrain bound's TOP, LEFT, BOTTOM & RIGHT coordinates. (Whenever a custom ASCII file is inserted, it will automatically show the file's boundaries)
Options

• Select server type for the downloading data (The "HTTP" & "FTP" servers are natively hosted by NASA)
• Check "GENERATE FROM CENTER OF TILE" to generate the terrain from the center of the downloaded elevation data regardless of inserted coordinates in Latitude/Longitude fields (Sometimes the location you choose is near topmost, leftmost, bottommost or rightmost of the downloaded data, in this case when you press "GENERATE TERRAIN" button, it first analyses terrain bounds to see if it exists in the data. If it's out of bounds you will be notified by a warning and terrain generation will be stopped. You either have to change specified location or check this option to take data's center point as the specified point)
• You can set the cache folder for downloading elevation data inside a folder in your project so that Terrain Generator can read & write the data in that location (By default the cache folder is Assets/TerraLand/Cache). You can then remove these data files from your project when you don't need them for terrain generation anymore
• Turn on "EDIT TERRAIN HEIGHTS" option to change the whole terrain heights in real-time (Using this option on terrains with usually more than 1024 resolution will cause Unity to slow down so take cautions about this. Heights will be updated only when the mouse pointer is on the Elevation slider or field)
• RESET TERRAIN button to reset initial generated terrain's shape if you have edited the heights

Amir Badamchi

 

Wondering if there is any ETA on the next release? Really keen to get our hands on the world wide terrain/imagery.

 

Excellent timing tomatosource because we are just a few days away from TerraLand 2 release. But global elevation & imagery data coverage has been there for several months now for current customers as Beta packages so it was there before. However, the new release covers many new features and improvements which will be announced upon its release.

We are currently updating our website and new updates/products will be placed there. A fully functional version of TerraLand 2 will be available on our website for the first 5 days for free. You can subscribe to our newsletter by sending us email to "info(at)terraunity(dot)com" and we will also announce the dates and instructions here in forums whenever the product is available.

In addition, "TerraEnhancer" will be available in a month or so as a separate package at about $100 which will be free for TerraLand 1 customers before TerraLand 2 launch.

 

Some questions:

-How do you deal with floating point precision issues when flying very far from the origin? Does it use a system similar to this?
http://unity3d.com/learn/resources/talks/gis-terrain-unity

-It doesn't seem it is compatible with Unity 5 as I get this error with the demo package:

-Terrain LOD popping is visible. Any plans to smooth that out?

-Your website terraunity.com is either down or extremely slow. I suggest you change your server provider.

 

No methods were used to overcome the floating point precision issues in our demos but the technique that we use for our projects is to offset the camera/player & objects position after a certain amount of distance from the origin to keep the calculations around zero and smaller values.

This error is related to "MeshCombineUtility.cs" script by Unity due to api changes since 4.x versions but generally you don't need this script anymore since then as it can automatically batch mesh's children by static/dynamic batching.

All products operate on Unity's built-in terrain system so you can tweak settings and sliders in Unity's terrain settings to take control of quality and performance. The main option for smoothing out the LOD on terrain is the "Pixel Error" slider in terrain settings. The smaller the value is, the more smoother the LOD will be in cost of more performance loss.

We never heard about it yet, would you please tell us from which country and browser you are trying to open the website! Did you have success in opening the site properly at all?

 

I am located in Vietnam and have a fiber optic internet connection. The site just times out and nothing is loaded. All other sites on the net work fine.

 

Thanks a lot for sharing, we just contacted the server provider to sort out the issue...

 

TerraLand 2 Is Released. More info in the new thread: TerraLand 2 Official Discussion Thread

 

Video tutorial for TerraLand 2's "Downloader" component has been released. Other components tutorials are on the way.

Link To Tutorial Sections

• Intro
• Package Importing
• Loading Component
• Defaults Testing
• OFFLINE DATA
• Downloads Folder
• NEW TERRAIN SETTINGS
• AREA SELECTION
• AREA SIZE
• INTERACTIVE MAP
• HEIGHTMAP DOWNLOADER
• SAVE ELEVATION DATA
• Loading ASCII in Global Mapper
• SATELLITE IMAGE DOWNLOADER
• FAILED IMAGES DOWNLOADER
• PRESET MANAGEMENT
• TERRAIN BOUNDS
• OPTIONS
• Terrain Neighbors Script
• ENGINE RESOLUTION PRESETS
• Sample Environments by TerraLand