The last project from class that we had to do was to make terrains within Unity by using tools already built into the program. I did not know that Unity had that capability, so I thought it was really cool. However, I'm sure there are many features to the terrain tool that I still did not even use, so I want to look into some of the other things it can do.
First, the things I know it can accomplish. The tutorial we used covered creating a terrain, editing the height map to create mountains and valleys and everything in between, as well as adding grass and water, and adding textures to the terrain. I also saw that there was a feature to add trees, but we never used this feature in the tutorial. Just by going to the Unity online manual I found an answer to one of the questions I had when going through the tutorial we used in class, which had been created in an older version of Unity. The tutorial talked about creating plateaus, but the method that they used would not work for me. The manual however shows that there is now a specified tool specifically for this purpose. Instead of setting a maximum height on the whole terrain as the tutorial said to, now next to the raise/lower height button, there's a new button, paint height. Here you can enter a target height that the terrain you are currently painting will not exceed. This is really cool because it means that you can make multiple flat areas at different heights more easily. The next page on the Unity manual is a little more interesting: trees. Trees differ from grass in that they are actual objects with colliders. The environments package comes with default trees but also makes it easy to create your own trees from within the program. Then, there's also a setting for tree density, making it easy to quickly place either just a few lone trees, or an entire forest. Unity is very nice in the way that it renders trees so that when you're further from them, it will use shortcuts to keep the program running smoothly (ie maybe making some distant trees appear more flat than 3D until you approach them, and not adding fancy effects like wind to them quite yet.) The tree page also mentioned something called "Windzones" which I noticed had its own page. These are interesting because they can either be components of an object or their own game objects. The manual does not seem to suggest any benefits to using one form over the other. However, they are very useful. This is what will make all of the trees on the terrain sway in the wind more realistically, but can also be used for smaller things, like an explosion that blows back the things around it. While I'm sure there are many other features to the terrain tool, I feel like I've already found a lot of new information, and will continue to learn more as I play around with this tool more often.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
February 2020
Categories
All
|