Terrain: Create

🌍 Creating a Terrain

Before creating a terrain, the most important thing is to know what you plan to build on it, and what kind of landscape you want.
Will your terrain host a single large house? A dense forest? A vast city or a small village? 🤔
This is the first thing to consider, because it's not always a good idea to go for the largest terrain size possible. Many beginners — myself included at the time — used to think: "I'll make a huge terrain for a big game!"
But we quickly realize... that's not always such a great idea. Bigger doesn’t mean better.

📏 For example, in the editor demo, the terrain is 512 x 512, and it already feels large. You can do a lot with that size.

💡 Why is this important? Because performance matters. The larger your terrain, the more demanding it becomes, especially for lower-end machines.
Even though the editor optimizes performance by splitting terrains into submeshes, large terrains still come at a cost.
That’s why the maximum terrain size is limited to 2048 x 2048 — and that’s already very, very large.

Also, the bigger the terrain, the more objects you'll need to decorate it... which adds even more to the performance cost. 🎮🖥️

🛠️ How to create a terrain

To create a terrain, open the right-side panel and expand the section titled "Create a terrain". It looks like this:

Start by choosing the terrain size from the dropdown list. Available sizes are:

• 64 x 64
• 128 x 128
• 256 x 256
• 512 x 512 (default)
• 1024 x 1024
• 2048 x 2048

Next comes the Subdivision value. The bigger the terrain, the higher the subdivisions must be — but ⚠️ be careful! Too many subdivisions can seriously impact performance.
Subdivisions determine how dense the mesh is. While more subdivisions result in smoother hills and curves, they also make terrain rendering more costly.
For that reason, the default subdivision value is pre-filled with a balanced value for good performance. If you increase it, do it just 10 or 20 points more at most — or better yet, leave it as is.

⛰️ Then you have Min Height and Max Height, which control the range of terrain elevation when you later use the sculpting tools to raise or lower areas of the terrain.

🗺️ Finally, there’s the Heightmap section. Here, you can select an image that defines the terrain shape. Choosing an all-black image will give you a flat terrain based on the parameters above.

Once the heightmap is selected, click the Generate button to create your terrain. It will be displayed with a default soil texture.
If you created a flat terrain, you’ll have full freedom to shape it however you want. If you selected a predefined heightmap, the terrain will already have hills and valleys — but you can still modify it, carve rivers, raise mountains, etc. 🌄

We'll explore all the sculpting tools in the next chapter: how to dig, raise terrain, create ramps, carve holes, apply random noise, erosion, and smooth out your landscape. 🪄