Terrain tips & tricks | Unity 2019 -Tutorial

as a game developer I create thousands of landscapes and the majority of these landscapes are created using Unity's terrain system over my time using this system I have learned many useful tips and tricks and today I'll be teaching you some of them. By default terrains are set to static which will cause Unity to start light map baking which isn't good whilst creating terrains as it will slow down your system and also just be a massive pain, there are two ways to fix this, you can simply disable light map static on your terrain or go into your lighting settings and disable auto generate Sometimes when sculpting your terrain you need to lower the height and sometimes this isn't impossible due to hitting the minimum height of your terrain, so to stop this from happening make sure to increase the height of your entire terrain prior sculpting. You can do this by navigating to the paint height section and inputting your desired height and then simply pressing flatten If you would like to increase the size of a terrain you can do so by adjusting the width and length variables in the settings, this will however stretch out any already sculpted features. Depending on how large a terrain is you may notice that you can no longer get small details, by increasing the heightmap resolution you can remove this issue, keep in mind that increasing this value will decrease performance Ambient lighting has a large influence on the realism and mood of your scenes and too often people just ignore this feature leaving it at the default gray color. For daytime scenes the color of your directional light should have a yellow tint while the ambient lighting should have a blue tint this will result in more realistic shadows. For nighttime scenes the color the directional light should have a blue tint with a low intensity whilst the ambient light should be dark and have a blue tint, if you want complete darkness set the ambient light to black. The ambient lighting can also be controlled by a skybox, which is great if your skybox dynamically changes. In reference to the procedural sky boxes which can be created by right-clicking in your project and selecting create material and then clicking on the created material and selecting shader properties, skybox, procedural. The sky tint and ground color affect the ambient lighting Now fog isn't just used in, well, foggy scenes it's also a great way to create a aerial perspective effect which is when distant objects appear with a blue tinge To enable fog go into the lighting settings and scroll down to the bottom and in 'Other' settings you will see a fog parameter, for the best effect match the color of your fog with your skybox which can easily be done with the color picker tool, finally reduce the density as you want this effect to be subtle Unity's default directional light parameters have a weak intensity which causes scenes to feel flat and unrealistic, so it is a good idea to increase the intensity of your directional light, I often use a value of 1.5. Increasing the intensity will also increase the contrast between your lit areas and your shadows, I find this contrast is an improvement although if you find that it is too strong you can keep the default directional light intensity and instead increase the post exposure parameter which is within the color grading section from the post-processing stack Grass by default looks awful yet with a few adjustments we can transform grass from this to this, so to do that make sure that the healthy and dry color is set to white, next disable billboards, this will remove that creepy grass movement that always follows the player. With these settings you may find that your grass stretches a lot in game to get rid of this issue simply go into the terrain settings and reduce the bending value, for that last bit of detail apply some ambient occlusion using the post-processing stack, if you are unaware what this is I have an entire video going over how to install and use the post-processing stack linked in the description One of the most important visual components of a game is the ground therefore it is important to spice it up with some diversity, this can be done with multiple grass textures small bushes, flowers and even stones and pebbles If you don't have access to a range of ground models you can adjust the height and color parameters of your current grass to cheat the effect The base textures are also important and you should use multiple textures and shy away from large patches of single materials as this will cause the tiling effect to easily be noticed by the player. Applying additional maps to the textures such as normal Maps is even better Movement is an important element which can make his scenes feel alive By default your grass should move as if being blown by a breeze which is great! however, trees won't be affected by default so to get our trees moving we need to add a wind zone to our scene. To do this right-click in your hierarchy and navigate a 3d object wind zone, the direction of the arrow is the direction of the wind, by default I find that the strength of the wind zone is way too high so I recommend lowering the main attribute to something like 0.3 A lot of the time you'll be sculpting mountains when working with the terrain system so here are a few tips to create realistic mountains. Firstly I like to use this brush and set a high size and low opacity, this way we will have more control and keep in mind when sculpting that your mouse should be constantly moving as this will avoid regions becoming too steep. To start slowly build up your foundation by circling the terrain. As your Mountain gets steeper reduce the brush size, also try to avoid that generic pyramid shape Next define particular branches of the mountain to create further variation once this is done add sub branches for that final level of detail Viewing real-life images of mountains can also be a massive help to ensure realism An easy way to create clouds is to adjust the particle settings of Unity's DustStorm particle, available as a standard asset from their particle package. What you need to do is change the particle texture tint to white, then increase the particle size, decrease the particle speed, decrease rotation over the lifetime increase the start life time and finally decrease the emission rate over time compressing this particle by reducing the gameobject size can also make a nice fog effect Here are some useful features that you may be unaware of. When sculpting with the paint height tool, if you shift-click you can sample the target height When erasing with the paint trees tool if you hold ctrl you will only erase objects of the selected type. To hide trees and other detail objects while editing you can go into the terrain settings and untick draw The F1 to F6 keys correspond to the various terrain tools. The comma and period keys cycled through the available brushes, shift comma and shift period cycle through the available objects for trees, textures and details. Pressing the F key will focus the camera at the mouse's position on the terrain So that's all for this video and I hope you learned something new today if you have any other tips and tricks be sure to let me know in the comments below With that being said I'll see you in the next one :D

Channel: Sketch

Views: 176,018

Keywords: unity, unity3d, tutorial, terrain, speed, realistic, 2019, learn, advance, scene, simple, unity tutorial, graphics, detail, fps, game, speed level design, unity level design, good graphics, unity 5, terrain tutorial, unity tips and tricks, tips, tricks, programming, coding, indie, developer, level, design, level design, realistic graphucs unity, how to create realistic graphics, easy good graphics in unity

Id: bq_PIBWw5oI

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 14 2019