How to use the POLARIS TERRAIN EDITOR for Unity!

what's up guys justin here with the realtimeessentials.com back with another unity asset tutorial for you so in today's video we're going to check out polaris an asset for unity designed to help you do low poly terrain editing inside of your levels so let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so you can find polaris on the unity asset store and i do want to note that currently it is on sale as a part of their black friday sale right now it's on a lightning deal which means that it's 70 percent off once 106 more licenses of it are sold then it'll drop down to 50 percent off for the remainder of the sale but um you can find it inside of the asset store i will link to this in the notes down below and so this is basically a tool set for creating low poly terrain inside of unity so there's a number of different tools in here things like the erosion simulator things like there's a number of different sculpting tools and painting tools spline tools for making pads other things like that so there's a number of different tools in here as well as it's got some low poly sample assets that come along with it as well things like grass or things like trees and rocks and other things like that and then if you scroll down even further there's also links to the documentation as well as their discord page which is where you can go to ask for help so for me i got this as a part of a low poly tools bundle which is a bundle containing polaris and then also their skies pack and their water pack for you it's probably just going to say pinwheel studios and you're just going to look for polaris and you want to make sure that you import that into your unity and so once you get it enabled what you want to do is you want to go into your game object settings under 3d object and you want to look for polaris and specifically we're going to start with an option called the terrain wizard and so the terrain wizard is basically going to give you control over a lot of the things that you can create with your terrain so there's an option here if you're running the universal render pipeline which i am in order to install the additional package that they need there but then down below you start getting options for actually creating a terrain and so you can see how the first option is going to be to actually create your terrain so that's going to give you the ability to adjust the size of the terrain that's created and created there's some other functions in here as well like the texturing model which we're not going to worry too much about for right now for right now we're just going to stay on gradient lookup and we're going to go ahead and click on the button for create and so when we do that what that's going to do is that's going to create a terrain inside of your scene so this is going to work a lot like any other terrain would inside of unity but this has a tool set that you can use in order to start making some adjustments to that and so we could continue using this window but for right now i'm going to pull that off to the side i'm going to show you how to do this manually inside of your inside of your window so basically the way that this works inside of polaris is your terrain editing tools are not a part of your terrain object they actually get placed in here as separate components and so if we click the little drop down right here and then click on our terrain you're going to notice there's a g stylized terrain script that's been applied to this well if you click the drop down there's a lot of different things you can adjust in here having to do with the width the height and the length as well as a bunch of other things as well so things like the shading things like which we'll look at in a little bit things like foliage things like you can use the neighboring function in order to add neighboring terrain by clicking on the connect button and then notice how i can click on a neighboring terrain in order to add more terrain so you can use this in order to add different neighbors and other things like that but now let's take a look at some of the tools that we can use in order to adjust this so what we want to do is we want to right click in here and under a 3d object polaris tools notice how there's different options in here that you can apply to your terrain so in this situation for example we just want to apply a tool to this terrain right here so we're going to right click go to 3d object polaris tools and let's go ahead and let's select the geometry texture painter so we're going to click right here in order to do that we'll notice what that does is that applies or it creates this geometry texture painter object that's going to allow you to come in here and adjust your geometry by clicking and so let's make a couple different changes to this real quick so we're not going to worry too much about these options right here notice how you can check and uncheck the enable live preview option in order to see the actual preview of what's going to be created in here but notice how there's multiple different modes in here so there's options to adjust the elevation there's options to add noise terracing other things like that so as well as options to change things like the color but let's say for example that we wanted to create just a little bit of terrain in here well there's different brush masks in here that are going to act as different shapes you'll notice how when i select those different shapes that's going to affect how the brush is applied to this terrain so let's go ahead and select this one right here and first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to adjust my target strength down so if you adjust your target strength down notice how the effect that's being created in here isn't nearly as pronounced you can also adjust things like the size or the radius so if i was to type in a value of 150 for example notice how this is going to be a lot bigger than if i had a value of like 50 like this let's go ahead and set our brush size a little bit bigger maybe like a hundred and we're going to keep our target strength low and i'm just going to click inside of the scene you'll notice how when i click inside of the scene this is going to move my terrain up based on where i've clicked right so this is coming in here and this is moving my terrain up and down based on the location of my clicks notice how if you click and drag like this you can add a lot of terrain really quickly but on the other hand when you add a lot of terrain really quickly sometimes it's easy to lose control over what's being created notice how you can also use the control and left mouse button to lower this back down so you can do a control left click in order to lower this or you can hold shift and use the left mouse button to smooth and when you smooth notice how what it's doing is it's smoothing out these sharp edges that are on here as i click and drag so in the case of the smooth you probably are going to want to click and drag and then just note that you're going to get different results using different brushes so just kind of play around with these and see what kind of results you get with each one of them so for example i'm probably getting a little bit better result with this one than i am with this one but it just kind of depends on what you're trying to do and so let's just create kind of a simple terrain in here so nothing too complex or anything like that i'm just going to sculpt this up a little bit so i've got some kind of upper levels in here and so notice how within our terrain and texture painter script there's options in here to do things like changing the material so you can do that either by painting the albedo so the albedo is basically going to be the color or material that's applied to this object so you can either use this as kind of like a paint brush like this so notice how if i click in here this is going to allow me to paint a color on top of this so you can manually paint that there's also a thing called a splat which you can use in order to paint a material texture file on top of here notice how i currently can't do that because of the kind of shader that we created on this surface so we can talk more about that in a second but real quick let's just go in here and let's just apply some albedo to this surface so so this is going to work the same way that the terrain painting did so you can adjust things like your target strength notice how if i turn my strength way up it's going to be a lot brighter with a single click if i turn it down then you're going to get a less pronounced look and you just have to click and hold a little bit more in order to apply materials to this surface in a more pronounced way so you can kind of adjust that to get the control that you want but notice how i can come in here and i can paint these up so that we get kind of a snowy look on my upper peaks just by clicking inside my scene and if you want to take that away you can just do a control left mouse in order to paint that away so let's say we wanted to paint like a white albedo right here then now let's paint more of a green albedo so something like this right here so you can see how you can paint materials on top of this in addition you can also select your terrain and then you can go back inside of that polaris window so you could go to what is it game object 3d object polaris and click on the terrain wizard but you could select this terrain and then go back and set your shader instead of the gradient or the color map you could set it to the splat right here and we'll just go with the splats8 for right now and click on set but notice how now that's going to reference those splat maps that we talked about for those materials instead so if i was to click in here now and go into splat notice how there's a couple different splats in here that i can paint on my surface like this in order to quickly add texture to the surface and then if i wanted to paint like this rocky material i could do that on these upper areas just like this so you can use the splats in order to do that all right so let's create some new terrain over here real quick so let's go ahead and let's adjust this we're going to bring our target strength down again and we're just going to create some real simple terrain so we'll go with something like this for right now and let's say that we wanted to texture this terrain based on the height or the steepness so what we can do is we can actually go back into the polaris window right here and so for this object let's go and set our shader to be gradient lookup and click on set when we set our texturing model to be gradient lookup what that means is that means that we're going to be able to use gradients and curves to shade based on height and so we want to do is we want to go in we want to select our terrain right here and we want to go down to the shading option and so what we've got is we've got a couple tools in here that are going to allow us to adjust the color of the terrain based on the height or the steepness and so notice if i click on one of these it's going to give me a gradient editor and the gradient editor is going to allow me to adjust the transition between the different colors based on different things and so we want to do remember this is a new piece of terrain so we want to select this piece of terrain right here the low poly terrain remember that you set the gradient colors inside the actual object not using a painting tool and so notice how right now this is all getting this kind of like desert-ish color and so real quick let's go ahead and let's jump in here and let's just mess around with these sliders just a little bit so what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag these sliders all the way to the left well notice what's happening in here is this is actually using the height above ground in order to adjust the colors that are being applied in here so notice how when i drag this to the left for example what's happening is this is basically creating a gradient where it takes the colors and it merges them together or it blends them together based on their height so notice how you get kind of this like gradient change between these two objects based on where these arrows are so let's say for example that i wanted this to start off green well all i would do is i would just get rid of this and i would just drag this over here so to get rid of it you just drag it away but then let's say that i wanted this to transition to a white color near the top so all i would do is i'll just drag this slider over here well notice how when i do this what's going to happen is you're going to get a white material near the top of this object you can set this so that it basically has like snowy materials up high and then green grass down below or something like that and so you can use that tool in order to adjust the transition between different colors on your terrain and so then let's say we wanted to add something like trees in here well what you could do is you could right click and then under 3d object polaris tools notice there's a bunch of tools in here that we're not really going to be able to get into in this video but we can look at the option for foliage painter so what the foliage painter is going to do is that's going to allow you to paint foliage into your scene so um what we've got for example is we've got a library of trees in here so these all come built in to polaris for you to use but what you can do is you can click and drag in here in order to use this to paint trees into your terrain right here so notice how if i click on both of these then it's going to randomly place either one of them in here if i just click on one then it's going to randomly place one but again it kind of works the same way where it uses your brush size in here in order to do this and obviously my height's a little bit off with the height of my trees right here but you can use this in order to quickly add your low poly trees in here there's also options in here for painting things like grass so let's say i wanted like grass and flowers and maybe some rocks in here i can use this in order to paint those in as well and so notice how that's basically going to place whatever objects you have selected in here and if you want to add these kind of like heavier then you can make your brush size a little bit smaller but we could also come in here and just place the grass if we decided we wanted to do that so you could use this in order to quickly add grass to this scene and so there's also a spline function built in that allows you to basically texture paint based on an actual line that you draw on your terrain so i haven't been able to 100 figure that one out yet i'm still working on that it looks like a really powerful tool but there's not a ton of documentation on how it works other than the stuff contained inside of the actual user guide itself but you can definitely use it in order to let's skip ahead real quick you can use it in order to apply things like textures and other things like that in order to create roads and other things that actually follow along with terrain so it's a really powerful tool i'll get more into it in the future i just need to practice with it a little bit more but it's definitely in there and it's definitely a powerful function that you can use so i will link to polaris on this page leave comment down below and let me know if there's something else you'd like to see with this tool as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this i really appreciate it and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The RealTime Essentials

Views: 730

Keywords: unity, unity software, unity 3d, unity 2020, unity 2021, unity polaris, unity polaris terrain, unity terrain editor, unity polaris tutorial, unity polaris terrain editor, unity terrain polaris

Id: CHy7bcGnDZA

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021