Unity 3D: Lunchtime Lessons

- [Instructor] Hi, I'm George Mastry. If you're familiar with Unity, you probably know how to create terrain, but Unity has updated its terrain tools very recently. Now, these are still a preview release, but I thought I would show them to you so that you can get used to them, because they will become a part of Unity. So if you want to start off in the package manager, and there is a terrain tools. Now, I am recording in 3.02. You may have a later version for yourself, or it may be out of preview. So, that's what I'm using, and so I've already installed it. Now, when you install it, there's also this button here that says download asset samples. And when you do that, it basically brings up this window in the Unity store, and you can download those and install them, and I already have, and it includes a number of different brushes and textures that will help you get started with this really cool new tool. So go ahead and install everything, and then we'll go ahead and create some terrain. So we can create terrain in one of two ways. We can use the old fashioned way. So we can go into game object, 3D object, terrain, and create it that way. But we have a new window here. Under window, we have terrain, terrain toolbox. This allows us to create a new terrain of a custom size, allows us to tile that terrain. We can also import things such as height maps with that terrain. Now, when we create the terrain, it's going to create its own subfolder for all the terrains under assets slash terrain. If you want, you can change that. I'm going to leave it as it is. Then we can also change our terrain settings. If we want to, we can go into basic settings and basically just change whatever we want to make the terrain exactly the way we want. We also have some utilities, and some visualization modes as well. So I'm just going to start off with create new terrain, and let's go ahead and hit create. So I'm just going to leave it at the defaults of 500, and we're going to create it at the origin. So when I do, it creates this terrain. Now, a terrain is basically just a blank pallette onto which we can sculpt the terrain. So it also creates this terrain group, and then in that terrain group, you can paint into the terrain. Now, there's a couple of buttons here in the terrain. If we go into the inspector, you'll see we have the ability to create neighboring terrain. So if I click on one of these edges, it creates another terrain. Now, I don't really need that, but if you want to create a bigger space, you can certainly add in as many terrains as you feel is necessary. But we're going to focus a little bit more on painting and sculpting terrain. So we've got a number of tools here. We have sculpt tools, we have effects, we have stuff like erosion, but probably the most important one is raise or lower terrain. So you want to select that, and then we have a number of brushes. Now, some of these brushes came in with that pack that we installed, so I'm going to go ahead and just select one of the default brushes here, which is basically just this kind of circle shape. And as you can see, as I hover over it, it gives you kind of an impression as to what that brush will do. Now, the brush itself has a brush strength, as well as jitter. We also have a brush size, so you can change the brush size here. So if I want a bigger brush or a smaller brush, I can do that. Now, if I want, I can also just click on it, and it will go ahead and make it that size. If I click and hold and drag, you'll see that it basically makes it bigger and bigger. Now, I have a number of really cool brushes here that I can use, so if I want to, I can create some mountains here. So I'm really just selecting these tools at random, and you can kind of see how they work. And I can start to paint my terrain the way that I want. Now, if I want to go back and modify it, I can. I can select the tool here, and if I hold down the control key. it will go ahead and kind of lower that terrain. Or basically, it's kind of like the erase key. And if I just left click, it'll go ahead and raise that terrain. Now, some of this is going a little bit out of control, so what we want to do is keep our brush strength fairly low, especially if you're working with a mouse. Now, if you're working with a pen or something like that, or some sort of WACOM tablet, then you'll have a little bit more control with the pressure. Now, in addition to raising and lowering terrain, we can also smooth that terrain. And again, that brush strength is really important. I tend to set mine fairly low and then just go over it a few times. Now, we also have the ability to add in all sorts of effects, so if I want to, I can create what's called a terrace. So by going along this edge here, you can see that it's creating kind of, like, a terraced hillside effect, which is kind of neat. I can create effects, so if I wanted to, I can sharpen the peaks. Let's say I do that on this one. It's basically sharpening that. I can flatten a slope, so that's basically, and again, I want to keep my brush strength fairly low on this, but what I can do is I can kind of slope that out to kind of make a sort of erosion sort of effect. And we also have erosion effects, so if I want to, I can create, like, a hydraulic effect. So there's a number of different tools that you can use. So as you can see, Unity's new terrain tools are very robust and they really allow you to sculpt the terrain exactly the way that you want.