In this video we’re going to take a look at building terrains with the unity terrain tools package and the universal render pipeline the terrain tools are a great way to create high performance worlds for many platforms with exceptional flexibility and creative freedom it works in concert With the rest of the systems in unity as an entry point to creating many types of games and simulations once you have some familiarity with the terrain tools you’ll find they are a great way to build worlds define your project’s style and that it offers a number of features that allow You to create highly polished scenes to get started with the latest terrain tools in unity 2020.1 you’ll need to make sure that the package manager is set to enable preview packages under project settings package manager advanced settings for this demo we are also installing a few other free terrain assets from the Asset store you can find a list of those packages in the description with terrain tools installed we can now start building our terrain choose window terrain terrain toolbox dock the terrain toolbox and go to create new terrain tab in the tab you’ll see options for size height starting position Among other settings let’s create one terrain with all of the default settings down at the bottom of the window click create and you’ll see the new terrain in your scene raising and lowering your terrain is the most essential component of editing your terrain mesh with your terrain mesh selected in the hierarchy window Make sure your inspector is visible and you’ll see a number of icons at the top of your terrain component the brush icon is where you will perform most direct edits to the terrain geometry and textures under the row of icons click on the drop down and select raise or lower terrain select A simple round brush mask and you are now ready to modify your mesh let’s create some basic hills and raised areas to create more detailed terrain without obvious staircasing the terrain tool supports brushes with 16-bit depth a number of them are included with the terrain tools sample asset pack which we have linked To in the description here are some examples of the brushes in action holding a on the keyboard adjusts the strength of a sculpting brush s alters the size of the brush and d rotates the brush holding the shift key alters the brush behavior to smoothing and holding the control key inverts the Brush lowering terrain with a brush mask instead of raising it if you’d like to modify these key bindings they can be rebound using unity’s shortcut manager the noise brush can be used to create many high frequency details across your terrain adding a bit of randomness to the terrain mesh The latest terrain tools also include erosion brushes that can simulate the effects of wind water and thermal changes to the mesh used in conjunction with other brush parameters they can create many highly realistic effects delving even further into our tools we have brush mask filters these powerful brush filters can parameterize your strokes Creating multi-layered inputs that make creating dynamic effects a breeze once you have your terrain feeling like it has a good rough placement of features you can move on to texturing one of the great parts of the unity terrain workflow is that you have the ability to easily iterate refine and Improve any part of the mesh at any point with a solid understanding of the texture system you can then start refining and bringing your scene to life building a palette of terrain materials in the layers tab greatly simplifies terrain painting a word to the wise though it’s important to understand that The order of textures is easy to change but you can easily cause potential visual issues with the terrain mesh changing the order after you’ve started to texture working out your palette beforehand will make it easy to put your materials back in order should an accident occur with the order of materials in mind You should understand that when you paint textures you are actually painting a weighted index into a splat map the terrain shader in urp can mix between an unlimited number of terrain layers however with height-based blending enabled unity supports four terrain layers and one splat map you can save your texture palettes into Presets to easily set up terrain meshes with similar biomes and features terrain materials themselves are a custom material type that supports albedo normal mapping and a special mask texture with multiple features the mask texture supports a metallic value in the red channel an ambient occlusion value in the green channel A height value which greatly enhances material blending in the blue channel and a smoothness value in the alpha channel if you opt not to include the mask channel you have metallic and smoothness overrides for the whole material the height value will only affect the material if height based blending is enabled Crucial to the look of any material are the tiling settings which include the size of the texture and offset which will offset based on a scalar quantity relative to your texture size with your basic setup complete you can begin to define features in our example we are constructing a temperate forest Set on rolling hills with clearly defined footpaths we have green washes to define primarily wooded areas we also have mossy areas for the darkest dampest portions of our scene we have rocky patches that would collect at the bottom of basin areas cliff patches for more vertical sections Of the terrain where grass and moss would be less likely to collect and a couple of dirt materials for sections that would get more foot traffic from people and wildlife more damp and pock marked on the edges more dried and cracked near the middle whatever type of scene you’re making You want to try to think like nature and factor how basic elements would interact with your terrain ask yourself where the sun hits where water flows to and where rocks would roll down to coupled with quality reference materials you can really start to work out a logical and harmonious relationship of your Scene elements with your terrain coming together with underlying textures the next step towards making our scene more believable is to add trees and other vegetation to the terrain in the terrain component we now move on from the brush palette to the tree palette first you’ll want to hit edit trees And we’ll add a couple of the speed tree trees that we have linked in the description since i’m building this scene for desktop i’ll be choosing broadleaf desktop and conifer desktop as my source models before we place any trees let’s raise the random sizing range and uncheck Lock width to height to get some extra variation to the silhouettes of the trees just make sure you keep the numbers in a reasonable range so you don’t start to notice awkward deformation of the trunk and branches then select the broadleaf prefab from the tree palette click the mass place trees button to Rapidly populate the terrain you’ll see a dialogue with a tree count for our quarter million cubic meter zone fifteen hundred to two thousand trees is about the correct number for a healthy forest on this much land with your first tree type populated you’ll notice that with a primary Directional light you have very harsh black shadows on the trees this is usually visually undesirable and happens because urp does not support global illumination or reflection probes for trees you can mitigate this by adding a couple of directional bounce lights as children of your primary directional light these can help reduce Obvious harsh shadows and even enhance the underlying shapes of your trees just make sure you have a low overall value of light toned to match the overall color of the terrain make some modifications to your tree brushes size and density and you can then move around the terrain mesh Altering the placement of trees control clicking to remove trees from undesirable locations and using regular click strokes to add trees where they weren’t previously once you like the placement of your broadleaf trees you can choose the conifer trees and begin to add some variety to the forest with this mixture of shapes In your own creations you’ll want to experiment with a mix of trees at various stages of maturity but we can still get some nice looks with just these two variants with trees down and shaped nicely around our paths we can move on to the finishing touches with grass systems for our demo we’re Going to keep things simple and just use some grass and flower texture billboards add them to your palette and with that done the workflow is similar to painting tree placements variety is key as is not making any section too dense you want to have enough vegetation to break up the trunks of trees And make your hill shapes come to life pops of color with flowers and even drier colored grass will make the whole scene much more vivid without a lot of overhead this is where reference either from photos or even paintings can inform your placement and help you To find the sweet spot with the density of billboards unity also supports detail meshes so you can add fully 3d foliage rocks and other items to your terrain in a very dynamic way with all of your setup done and basic forms down now you can spend the time Really moving around your scene using the full spectrum of tools we’ve shown to polish your scene to a high level and even start testing some potential gameplay with your world set up you can quickly add a wind zone that will bring the trees to life keep the settings on the lower end Otherwise it will look like a hurricane simulation subtlety can be very nice after all let’s add in some equally subtle post-processing to enhance our final image quality and nail the desired mood take some time to wander around your creation in play mode and appreciate what you were able to Build with the terrain tools for more information about the terrain tools follow the link below thanks for watching you Video Information
This video, titled ‘How to build beautiful landscapes in Unity using Terrain Tools | Tutorial’, was uploaded by Unity on 2021-02-19 14:00:16. It has garnered 189782 views and 4286 likes. The duration of the video is 00:11:34 or 694 seconds.
In this video, we are going to walk you through Unity’s Terrain Tools to show you how you can easily create beautiful landscapes in your own projects!
Learn more about Unity’s Terrain Tools here! https://on.unity.com/3qA8mPP
Assets used in this video: Terrain Tools Sample Assets – https://on.unity.com/2NIGevj Azure[Sky] Dynamic Skybox – https://on.unity.com/3s7xqOD Grass Flowers Pack Free –https://on.unity.com/3qw7rQy Yughues Free Ground Materials – https://on.unity.com/2NjBZXr Free SpeedTrees Package — SpeedTree® – https://on.unity.com/2ZykkO6
Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:41 Get Started with Terrain Tools (Setup) 01:07 Start Building a Terrain 02:27 Terrain Brushes and Shortcuts 03:00 Creating Details 03:31 Brush Mask Filters 03:50 Texturing 07:04 Adding Trees 09:35 Adding Grass 10:48 Adding Wind
Unity Version used 2020.1