koobas.hobune.stream
Modelling game terrain
A newbie question - we are proposing to develop a racing game. But a question arises on if unity is the way to go for modelling the terrain? The terrain is set to be in a natural environment with trees, water and a mud track. Some folks are rooting to model the entire track in maya/3Ds max...i am still new to unity and understand the track can be modeled in unity itself. What are the pros and cons? Which is a better approach? PS - This would be a web game.
Unity's terrain support is based on height maps, which can be painted inside the Unity editor itself or imported from bitmaps. It can yield impressive results (eg. check out TTT: http://projects.lemuria.org/projects/ttt/wiki).
To make roads look right on a height map (eg. not just a general smeary gray streak on the terrain), these need to be modeled separately. The Unity Asset store contains some tools that can generate the road geometry for you and will also automatically flatten the height map under the road so the road will sit properly on top of it.
So using Unity (not necessarily creating the initial height map in Unity, but using Unity's terrain system) is better from a workflow and flexibility point of view.
If you're shooting for the absolute best in quality, modeling the environment in Maya or another 3D suite will yield superior results, however. You're not bound to a grid and can freely create overhangs, tight canyons, bridges, etc.
Thank you very much! Would using terrains modelled in maya be heavier in size compared to that built directly in unity? This is cause being a web based game, size is a major factor in the country we are targeting to put this up.
thanks, Rajiv
This is not a forum but a Q&A site - it works differently, you should use the comment function ins$$anonymous$$d of adding an answer ;)
But yes, modeling the terrain in $$anonymous$$aya would take up more space. A 512x512 height map in Unity would be about (512x512x3 =) 85 $$anonymous$$iB. Creating an identical terrain as a $$anonymous$$aya model would at least take (512x512x8x4 =) 8192 $$anonymous$$iB, assu$$anonymous$$g each vertex has a float (4 byte) position, texture coordinate and normal.
Aah I didnt notice :)...thanks for pointing out though
