Terrain

🌍 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 size of the lot from the drop-down list. The available sizes are:
  - 64 x 64
  - 128 x 128
  - 256 x 256
  - 512 x 512 (default)
  - 1024 x 1024
  - 2048 x 2048
• You have Min Height and Max Height, which control the elevation range of the terrain when you create the terrain with a heightmap.
• The Height Map section. Here you can select an image that defines the shape of the terrain. Choosing an all-black image will give you a flat terrain, according to the parameters set earlier.
• The Top parameter allows you to change how high your land will be positioned from the grid (or mother level). Changes are real-time once your land is created. But you need to create on Update terrain to update the changes.
• Opposite, there is the 'Heightmap Editor' button. This allows you to open an editor to draw your own heigtmap with a real-time preview.
• Once the height map is selected, click the Generate button to create your land. It will display with a default ground texture.
• The Terrain Update button activates after you have created a terrain to recreate it with new settings if needed.
• You can also delete it with the last button if you don't want any more land.

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. 🪄