Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Tips and Tricks
Layering textures is a very powerful way to add nice variation to any
terrain. However, if the layered textures are too different, no matter how
much Opacity adjustments and Target Strength tweaks are made, the
results can appear ham-fisted. By using textures that share a common hue
balance, the transition between the textures can appear much gentler.
Step 17:
Import and paint with additional textures to taste.
Tips and Tricks
Be sure to spend time only on areas that will be seen. Remember that
most of this terrain will never be seen by the player because of the fog.
A quick pass or two with additional textures helps to make the terrain
look better for sure, but if it isn't going to be seen, don't sweat it.
To check the progress, try turning on the fog (Edit>Render Settings) and
walk around the scene to see what holds up and what needs more refining.
Adding Trees and Rocks (Trees and Detail Meshes)
Once the Terrain's workflow is understood (as just outlined for painted textures),
the rest of the tools fall easily into an artist's toolbelt. Within the Terrain paradigm,
trees actually follow a similar workflow as textures. A tree is defined within
the Inspector, and then painted onto the surface of the terrain. Shift-painting
removes all trees and Ctrl-painting removes the trees of the selected type.
For a quick rundown of the technique and a few tricks, the next few steps will
make use of Unity's Terrain Assets package. We will paint in a few variety of
trees, and look at placement and editing strategies.
Step 18:
Import Unity's Terrain Assets package. Among the resources
Unity includes on its site is a collection of prebuilt Terrain Assets. They are
available at
http://unity3d.com/support/resources/assets/terrain-assets
and are a pretty nice collection of ready-to-use textures, trees, bushes, and
so on. Just go to the URL, download the package, and then import the
package (Assets>Import Packages>Custom Package…). This will create a
new Terrain Assets folder within the Assets folder of the project file.
Why?
True, using prebuilt, ready-everywhere-on-the-web assets is generally a
bad idea. If it looks good in your scene, it will look good (and exactly the
same) in everyone's scene. For a commercially created game, generally
it is preferable to make your own trees—and in fact, Unity now comes
with a really fun Tree generator (GameObject>Create Other>Tree…). But
for the learning process here, downloading and using prebuilt assets will
speed the overarching learning process.
