The Lazy Mans Guide To Terrain Generation in Unity
Terrain Creation Overview
As the author of Gaia, the most successful terrain, landscape and scene generation system ever on the Unity asset store, I know a thing or two about terrain and scene generation!
However, this was not always the case! What I learned, is that creating beautiful environments for your game is not easy at all. It requires artistic talent, and a deep understanding of how the engine works in order to be able to make nice environments that also run well.
In this article I will describe my journey, and show you can benefit from my knowledge to use Gaia to make beautiful environments in minutes so that you can focusing on creating the real value that people will get from your game - the game play!
From Humble Beginnings
In 2013, when I first started with Unity, I just wanted to get into a scene and run around. As simple as it sounds, this was not easy!
I wasn't a game engine guru, I was a largely self taught enterprise software guy who had been in the tech industry since 1984. I had no clue about how game engines worked, and thought, hey, how hard can this be to just run around in a scene. Hehe. Boy was I wrong. It's actually a lot of work!
I remember looking at an empty Unity scene and going... ok so what do i do next? Hmmm... so after some research I found worked out how to add a Unity terrain object to a scene. So i did that... but it was bland and had no colour, so then i learned that you needed to add textures to the terrain and use the terrain tools to shape the terrain. So i found some textures and added them.
But hang on, you need to also 'paint the terrain' in order to determine what texture goes where. So - i started painting the terrain - simples... except that my terrain was quite large and it took me an entire week to paint it. It turns out that 'painting the terrain' and blending textures together in a pleasing way is actually quite a lot of work.
That said, i made the environment for my kids, and we had so much fun designing and exploring it together, that i was hooked. We had embarked on a journey of imagination to find the "tree of life", and the huge amount of enjoyment I got from creating and sharing with my kids started me on the amazing journey that is now Procedural Worlds!
For some strange reason I made a video of it, and it serves as a reminder to me on exactly how far we have come: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCHpMbl8-u0
To amazing terrain, scene and landscape generation in minutes in 2020
As the author of the most successful terrain, landscape and scene generation system on the Unity asset store ever, I know a thing or two about terrain and scene generation!
However, even the experts need to start somewhere. My first environment took a week to make - and - it was abysmal! I used the terrain tools provided with Unity, my character, when i could work out how to add one fell to infinity (who knew about terrain colliders!), and it took ages.
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