Creating Terrains in Unity

The Unity Terrain Editor enables you to create detailed and realistic terrains. Using the provided sets of Terrain tools, you are able to efficiently design optimized landscapes with ease.

From the top menu dropdown, select: GameObject > 3D Object > Terrain. The five-icon toolbar in the Terrain component in the Inspector provides options to create neighbor Terrains, sculpt features into the landscape, and paint texture maps onto your Terrain. You can add trees as well as additional details such as grass, flowers, and rocks. You are also able to change general settings for the selected Terrain.

You can create neighboring terrains, but I’m going to stick with one. I like to start out by sculpting the terrain by raising hills, mountains, and even making some valleys. I really like using the “built-in brush 11” when raising the elevation up. It’s smooth on all sides and gives a nice gradient in height.

I like to create a mountainous border around the map and then focus on the innards of where the player will travel. Once that’s done, we can get to painting the textures in.

You can download the Standard Assets pack for some basic tools that will help along the way. This includes SpreedTree and TerrainAssets. As the name implies, SpeedTree will help you insert a number of realistic looking trees with ease. The TerrrainAssets contain a pack of various textures for you ground, including grass, dirt, sand, and some more.

In this process, I like to keep the opacity low so we can blend some textures together in certain areas. Just like with the height, you want everything to be transitional, there usually is not a straight line between grassy knolls and stone river rocks in nature.

You can download the SpeedTree package from the asset store and start adding in some forests or scattered trees around your map. You can Add Tree and select the ones you want, as well as adjust the height, bend, width, density and more.

Last, I would throw in a character or vehicle and cruise around your new world. See what you like and don’t like, make adjustments. Build onto your existing map or even go back and edit the foundations until you have something you’re very pleased with.

Lighting can be very important, I enjoy using a 3rd party tool called Aura2. It adds volumetric lighting and fog to your scene in a very quick and convenient way. There are many other tools out there to quickly give you a beautiful scene. Similarly, you can also create these affects yourself by modifying your directional lights, volumetric lights, and camera components.

You can also add in 2d grass or other 3d objects, adjust their random sizes and colors. You can set how windy your scene is and just get really creative with everything. Enjoy!