Research - Terrain Creation

When looking into terrains i decided my first port of call should naturally be the Unity documentation for it, finding in the end that this was all i would need.

See the page in question here.

The first section titled 'Using Terrains' covers the basics of terrain creation and manipulation. It reveals that terrains are effectively flat canvases upon which you 'paint' hills and cliffs and whatever else you require for your environment. You have a selection of brushes similar to those you might find when working with Adobe's Photoshop, and again in a similar fashion you have variable brush size and an 'opacity' which as you may expect affects the severity of the brushes impact on the terrain mesh. I was curious as to weather this tool could be used with a Graphics Tablet, but did not have the means to find out unfortunately.

The later sections cover more specific functions of the terrain tool.

'Height', offering a fairly ambiguous suggestion of its contents through its title, covers the different functions available for manipulating the height of the terrain mesh. Offered to you are the simple ability to raise and lower terrain, as well as more interesting abilities such as terrain smoothing, and raising or lowering to a specified height, allowing you to create flat levelled cliffs like those seen in the image below (taken directly from the guide.)

'Terrain Textures' covers not only the application of textures to a terrain mesh, but also the ability to include and blend multiple textures on a single mesh, a very useful function. Making use of the blending function is as simple as it is to create the terrain itself, you simply need to add your different terrain textures then 'paint' them on as you see fit.

'Trees', 'Grass', and 'Detail Meshes' all cover the addition of models to a terrain mesh. In keeping with the simplicity that the terrain tool offers, all of these functions allow you to 'paint' the different models directly on to the terrain mesh. In this instance the tool goes further to save you time by randomly varying these models scale and position, creating a varied environment with only a few models. While this is very useful for large environments, i could see it causing potential problems in more focussed experiences where level design needs to be very deliberate to maintain a games pace/difficulty.

'Lightmaps' covers just what it says. Lightmapping your environments can be a great way to improve the performance of your game whilst maintaining visual quality.

'Other' details the extra settings that are available in the terrain tool. These are mostly performance related settings such as the draw distance for various aspects of the terrain mesh. Also included, however are settings for the 'Wind', which adds some movement to an otherwise static environment by allowing for Grass models to be deformed or bent as if being affected by a breeze.

In summary, i will say that the terrain tool seems like it will be perfect for our needs. Our intention is to create track tile models and build up the terrain around them so that they blend in, and making use of the various model-placement functions should make the whole track creation process a lot easier, not to mention faster.