koobas.hobune.stream
Unity Terrain GameObject versus Custom Terrain
I was recently exploring and working through parts of Sebastian Lague's Procedural Landmass Generation series. Absolutely excellent series and I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about Unity and Terrain in general.
Anyways, I ran into a question that I can't seem to get an answer to. In his series, he walks the viewer through the process of making a Terrain asset in Unity from scratch. Therefore, almost entirely within your code, you're adding a mesh, textures, and adjusting the height and colors of the Terrain. All of which (correct me if I'm wrong) you can do with the Terrain Component on the built-in Unity Terrain GameObject, as seen in another tutorial I'm following (Penny de Byl's Procedural Terrain Generation with Unity, also a fantastic series that I would recommend).
So this leaves me with the question:
What is the benefit of creating Terrain through these methods (Sebastian's methods) as opposed to working with the Terrain GameObject/Components (Penny's methods)?
Lastly, I actually posted this on StackOverflow first but have not gotten an answer yet. If anyone thinks they have the right answer and also utilize StackOverflow, feel free to answer the question there well. Thanks!
I'm not 100% sure about this but I'm pretty sure that Unity's built-in terrain automatically calculates the amount of geometry needed for a particular area as opposed to Sebastian's method of just generating a grid of points and adjusting the amount of geometry based on the distance from the camera (Though this method could be expanded to do that), so really it depends on how much control you want over your terrain generation. Also Penny's tutorial has the cloud generation, vegetation placement, and weather effects which Sebastian's tutorial does not, though he does have a video about Passion Disc Sampling which I used to place trees on a procedural terrain that isn't infinite and you can probably find videos on YouTube for the cloud generation and weather effects as well.
