seamless terrain question

ive been looking pretty much on unity documentation as well as here in the forums, but cant seem to find information or exaples on how to do seamless terrain or seamless world creation, ie: create several terrains and join them together as the player can walk thru the zones without even noticing when walking thru different zones.

ive seen a few threads people asking the same question but dont see any clear way to do it, unless i ve missed it.

what ive seen other users stating that it can be done thru a script called terrain.setneighbor () but can anyone set an example in noob terms on how this is done?

for example to test arround on the demo island, if i create another terrain in this same demo project how do i or how can i enable the feature to page them together to create a seamless terrain or zones.

I will appreciate it much.

thanks for your time in advanced.

 

very good question(s), i hope for good answers too.

 

Brand new to unity. I just started playing with the demo yesterday (3/21).

Positioning the terrains: are all of the terrains in the same scene or are they separate scenes?

Where would you place the SetNeighbors functions for each terrain?

Thanks

 

The SetNeighbor function would be in the Start Function of a component thats aware of the terrain and its neighbors

 

So you could have all the terrains in the same scene (probably preferable if you're new to unity) or in separate scenes which you stream in when needed (more code necessary).

 

Hallo,

i have two questions to set.Neighbors

first: i tried this, but this doesnt work. How do i have to write it ?

Code (csharp):

1. var A: Transform;
2. var B: Transform;
3. function Start(){
4.  
5.     A.SetNeighbors(null,null,B,null);
6.  
7. }

second: does the set.neighbors thing bring the seams of two terrains together when starting the player or what does it do ?
because it is almost impossible to get seamless edges from hand or tiled heightmaps

 

@Achim

I am trying to figure this out myself,

@unity dev team, or to whom it may concern.

I just can believe Unity team does not have any documentation on this feature, unless i am completely blind and or missed it, a tutorial will be great for this topic.

I mean, streaming or seamless terrains is a great one of kind feature, feature that pretty much does not exist on the majority of the other game angines,
This should be a major sales pitch for unity.

Look at the 3d platform tutorial is a great tutorial, awesome. it cover so many stuff that will get any noob to dive in to the game developing with unity so easy.


In my opinion , I would love to see a tutorial on how to use this awesome feature, or any documentation if possible.

Unless, it is assumed that any game dev with experience should know how to use this feature even if he or she just recently started using unity engine.


I am trying to figue out why only there is a few threads regarding this topic with little to non concrete explanatios or guides. unless seamless terrains is not a usable feature or is not important for game devs.


anyways, sorry if i got a little carried away, I guess i got frustrated trying to make this work with no success.

feel free to post your input if any.

thanks again in advanced.

 

The documentation can be found in your terrain documentation, more specifically here


Thats all that is there and thats required to know about it.
In the editor you would create several terrains, align them correctly and likely have a management script with a 2D array where you assign the different terrain blocks according their positioning to be able to set the neighbors simply (a more flexible but less easy solution is building this array dynamically basing on the terrains position)
This script optimally is running in editor mode as well to have smooth terrain switches there as well.

The feature is simply a "link terrain blocks together to work smoothly like a larger terrain" but within the editor etc you still work on distinct terrain blocks.


Perhaps you expect that there are more things like streamed terrains etc, but this is not the case.
You can do further things like loading in the blocks dynamically at runtime and set the neighbors dynamically, thats what you likely will do for a really large world.
But that is not related to this feature as that is a common game object / resource / asset handling topic, not related to terrains in any way

 

@dreamora

i know where to find in the reference but i dont know how to write the correct script. can you give a working example ?

 

Exactly, i am trying to learn to loading blocks and setneigbors dynamicaly at runtime to build a large world,
if you have any input on it, I will appreciate it very much.
Now, will this feature available in the indie license?
thanks in advanced

 

this feature always has been present in the indie license.

This feature is used pretty project specific commonly, but here a basic script you can assign to a general management object in your scene and assign 4 aligned terrain blocks to it.

This is written out of head but should work just fine

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. using UnityEngine;
3. using System.Collections;
4.  
5. public class TerrainTiler : MonoBehaviour {
6.  
7.     public Terrain[] terrains;
8.     /*  Expects an array with 4 entries
9.     *   Layed out like:
10.     *   0 1
11.     *   2 3
12.     */
13.     // Use this for initialization
14.     void Start () {
15.         if( terrains.Length != 4 )
16.             throw new System.Exception("Incorrect number of terrains");
17.                
18.         terrains[0].SetNeighbors( null, null, terrains[1], terrains[2] );
19.         terrains[1].SetNeighbors( terrains[0], null, null, terrains[3] );
20.         terrains[2].SetNeighbors( null, terrains[0], terrains[3], null );
21.         terrains[3].SetNeighbors( terrains[2], terrains[1], null, null );
22.     }
23.    
24.     // Update is called once per frame
25.     void Update () {
26.    
27.     }
28. }

 

Thank dreamora,
ok, I think i am starting to get the hang of setneighbors to join terrains,

1 question:
In the initialization part, does this mean when scene is loading all 4 terrains will have to load at the same time in the scene, right?

Or will they be loading dynamicaly each terrain block on demand, what i mean on demand is when the ingame character walks thru the terrains blocks and terrains will load individually and as the character steps in next block the old block will be destroyed?

the reason that i ask this is for example:
I guess i can make a very large world and keep just adding blocks of terrain in the scene and use the setneigbors to join them, but there will be a limit of terraisn a scene can handle right?, since there will be so much that memory can handle if all terrains are loaded at once,

so if load terrains dynamicaly on demand as character or player moves arround and only have the present terrain in which the character is on active, and destroy the previous ones and if the further he walks into another terrain chunk the old one will get destroyed to release memory.


Or am i confused or confusing you, lol

anyways, thank you for your input, if you have any comments or advices will be greately appreciated.

regards

 

@dreamora
Thanks a lot for this script/example !

 

Can you upload a simple assets for this? How to set terrain on different position? Because all terrain I import on same position.

 

move them from the inspector ...

 

Just one thing, my script creates tiles of flat terrains and setneighbors them correctly now I wanna know how do I apply my raw terrain heightmap in a way that each terrain gets its share of the heightmap and not the entire map. Yes I'm trying on this TOD (Terrain On Demand) but there isn't just one example covering top to toe.
Thanks for your help

 

I would like to add that if you put this in the Awake function you get weird shadows around the terrain seams, and they stick even when the script gets turned off.

If you are having this problem, simply make sure the SetNeighbors() is in the Start function as dreamora has stated. I was really freaking out for a second.

And to clarify a point, I did notice that my terrain borders lined up perfectly with SetNeighbors on, and had noticeable gaps without it, probable the same gaps that created the shadow seams.

Good luck to all

 

Sleglik has a Terrain Kit in "Assets and Asset Store" that can do this and other features. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/102649-Simple-terrain-mapper

- Sleglik in one of his posts.

 

Hi I have been building large terrains, 6.147 x 6.147 klms - 3x3, 2049 heightfields at 1mtr scale.

I used L3DT(google it) to create my terrain which does nice erosion passes and then it also can output the heightfield so it tiles or subdivide a large heightfield into smaller tiles.

You then create a new terrain for each tile and manually import each heightfield.

You will then need to get Stitchscape which will fix any miss alignment with edge pixel values being different.

Set neighbours only ensures the dynamic terrain LOD or tesselation matches with its neighbour you will still need to ensure the edges of each heightfield have the same height values.

The only issue I have had is lightmapping each individual terrain so that each terrain affects the other terrain when bouncing light off each other or casting shadows it doesnt seem to work. You will want to lightmap them as this is much faster than Vertex lighting.



Unity limits Terrain heightfields to 4096x4096.