Making Terrain for Unity

Fragbert

Hi all, first official post here!

Anyways, I'm not to impressed by the terrain editor in Unity. I like to have full control of my environment. Currently I'm working on a project for school in which the setting is medieval/European/mountain/forest. Some of the scenes in our game are set in the forest/mountains and I want a very organic feel. I'm a huge noob to all of this so I'm not sure on how to proceed.

I found this [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0o3bqoM0Qg"]tutorial[/ame]which is a bit much for the Unity engine, but is the workflow something I should pay attention to? Should I just stick with the terrain editor in Unity? I haven't poked around in it too much so maybe my initial impressions were wrong.

If you have a completely different workflow/method please feel free to share it. I'm open to all ideas.

wichenroder

I posted these over at the Luxology forum, here they are again:

Follow this for the tools you need to import splatmaps etc:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/30299-Tom-s-Terrain-Tools-(update-new-version-released)

Here's a post I made about editing your Unity heightmaps in Zbrush:
http://www.chadchatterton.com/blog/13424846

Another post about using heightmaps from google earth in Unity:
http://www.chadchatterton.com/blog/12875559

If you have to write shaders you'll want this:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/56180-Strumpy-Shader-Editor-4.0a-Massive-Improvements

This plugin adds some terrain mapping features to the unity editor:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/98607-terrain-mapper-v1.0-RELEASED

This free plugin might be enough for you though, get this:
http://unity3d.com/support/resources/unity-extensions/terrain-toolkit

Unity's terrain tools are lacking, but you can get results eventually.

+ there's a basic tutorial for World Machine here: http://www.chadchatterton.com/downloads

Fragbert

Thank you very much! I think I'll experiment with all of them to be honest. I don't have to write any shaders but I'll definitely delve into that.

BadgerEatHoney

Try this: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/151365-Terrain-Composer-A-Tool-for-making-AAA-photorealistic-Unity-Terrain-in-just-minutes.