Gorgeous terrain is SUPER EASY (Unity Tutorial)

hey guys how's it going my name is Thomas brush from the creator of a game called pinstripe also a game called once upon a coma which is launching in a month I guess on Nintendo switch Xbox ps4 and pretty much every other platform you can think of one of the coolest tools in unity is the terrain tool it's really easy to learn and if you learn the basics you could pretty much create some incredible looking worlds even worlds that look a lot like breadth of the wild so let's go ahead and jump into unity and I'll show you how we can create terrains in unity already said that let's go I want to thank ex Ola axalta is a video game business engine helping gaming companies all types and sizes sell and monetize their games around the world since 2005 they've got a versatile dynamic platform ex ola lets you sell any type of digital good to

support any monetization model you choose so you can easily sell and manage pre-order subscriptions any kind of micro transaction virtual items virtual currency loot boxes season passes I mean there's also a pre integrative SDK for unity and unreal actually that's that's actually really huge so setup is a snap it's a snap eggs Allah accepts payments from over 700 payment methods worldwide with built-in coverage for taxes legal compliance and more so it makes it really really easy for you guys so right now you can download a free ebook from Sola Thank You axalta for the free ebook to help you learn some best practices for how to monetize your games guys monetization is huge so just visit the link in the video description all right so we're gonna go ahead and open up our unity hub and we're gonna create a new project called what are we gonna call this terrain land we're gonna

create terrain land and we're gonna create a 3d project I go straight to the asset store and I install the standard assets and right away click download click import and we're not gonna be picky here guys we're just gonna import every single asset rule-of-thumb guys don't ever be afraid to use an asset it's a great way to learn for one but it also saves a ton of time in the long run you don't really need to create everything from scratch anymore in games there's so many assets available to us all right so you might get a couple of alerts here we're just gonna clear those I'm not gonna worry about those we're gonna go straight to our scene and we're gonna delete our main camera ok the reason why is because we got to go to our standard assets we're gonna go to our firstpersoncharacter controller I'm gonna go to our prefabs and we're gonna drag in the FPS character and then what we're gonna do is go to our game objects 3d objects and we're gonna create a terrain now right away you're gonna notice your computer is starting to slow down and things are starting to change what's going on with all my colors

what's happening right now is it's automatically starting to bake in ambient occlusion and all sorts of lighting so what we're gonna do is go to our lighting tab here and you might need to go to window lighting to get there and we're gonna turn off mixed lighting right away we don't want things to bake we want to use real-time lighting and let at least for this tutorial let's turn off auto generate and then we're gonna click this tab here and clear the baked data we don't want any confusing weird artifacts left over from what I was trying to bake all right so what we're gonna do is actually position our camera towards the center here and what I like to do is select my FPS controller click game object and then go to a line with view so now the FPS controller with its camera are actually exactly where I was in the scene view what I like to do is create a 3d cube double click it and place it exactly on the ground the reason I do this is it gives us an idea of scale your character your FPS

controller should be double the size of the cube so now you can see we have a good idea of the player scale and how things should look that's gonna help us in the long run in creating our mountains the worst thing is to not know how big your mountains should be based on the character size so that gives you a good idea of how big you should be all right let's click on our terrain here and you'll see these little tabs here the first one is going to be your create neighbor terrains so if we select that we can actually create multiple terrains around this single terrain here and you can see they're created here what I like to do is just drag them so that they're all sort of stacked on top of each other if you wanted to you could parent them inside of an empty game object but for now we're gonna keep it this way you won't necessarily need this many but just for the sake of example I want to show you how you could create them and you could pretty much create as many as

you want the next tab is our paint terrain tab and this way we can actually raise and lower terrain we can set the height of the terrain we can also smooth out the terrain we can paint texture onto our terrain so this is really the tab that you're gonna be spending the majority of your time on so we're gonna go to paint texture and it's important to note that when you want to paint let's say a grass texture you are not going to be creating a new brush the brushes are how the actual texture is painted onto the ground but it's not the texture itself what you're gonna want to do is actually go to edit terrain layers you're gonna want to create a new layer and then we're gonna type in grass and you can see we have a grass Hill albedo included with our standard assets so we're gonna double click on that and as you can see a new layer was created so we're gonna select this layer and now as you can see we can actually paint this texture onto our terrain so as you can see it's very faint so we're

gonna do is we're gonna make it pretty large and pretty opaque and now we can sort of paint this onto our world so if you hit play you'll see that the grass is now painted on to our world looks pretty terrible huh so what we're gonna do is actually go to our terrain and what I want to do is create some mountains now so instead of painting on a texture we can actually raise or lower the terrain here and we can actually choose a pattern for raising and lowering our terrain I'm actually just gonna use this smooth brush here and what we're gonna do is go to our brush size let's keep our brush size the same and let's keep our opacity the same and now you can see we can raise and lower our height all across this world and so in the distance here we don't need that much detail we just want them to be pretty high but what we're gonna really

focus our attention on is this center Square here as you can see the center square is actually very large so we can focus all of our attention on that let's decrease the size of our brush and create some mountains here just like so and so I want to sort of surround my player with mountains sort of lock him in so just do something like this and if you guys want to add a little bit of detail after you've created the base abstract look you can go to this brush here and create some sort of ripples in the ground see that and so it's really whatever you want it to be you can create it so we've got it pretty aggressive right here so let's go ahead and smooth it out a little bit that brings us to this tool here which is the smooth height so we're gonna select that select our simple circle brush change the size bring the opacity

down a little bit and what you can do is actually smooth out a lot of the details you made so notice how its slowly smoothing it out so far looks pretty good so in general that's how you raise and lower the height of your world so now we have a pretty detailed looking mountain scape and what I want to show you right now is how we can actually paint details onto the terrain so we have this grass and so what I want to do is go back to our paint texture and we're gonna create a dirt layer let's create a layer let's type in dirt or stone or class there it is grass rocky albedo double click that and what we can do is select it make sure it's selected and let's bring the size of the brush down significantly bring that opacity down to about 17% and

we can go ahead and start painting various its texture all over our world give it a little bit of detail so this is just creating an abstract look for our mountains nothing too specific here just gives it a little bit of detail and then what we can do is just like in a game maybe like breath of the wild you can actually create some roads so decrease the brush size to about 40 or maybe even 15 we can just create some roads sort of going around here's the thing about unity and a lot of terrain tools you can't create really hard edges even if I use this brush here art the edges aren't very hard and that's because we're not actually painting onto the terrain what we're doing is we're telling unity where we want a texture to appear and loop so

what we're actually painting is something sort of like a mask an image mask or a mat telling unity where we want this looping texture to appear if it was a hard-edged Road it would actually be a ton of data for unity to calculate it'd be a huge high-resolution image and we can't do that so as you can see we have a road here that's cutting through the valley and that's just using the simple brush tools provided with the terrain tool let's exit play mode and what I want to show you now is how we can create grass to make things not look so I don't know land and also this looping texture here is really causing a lot of problems it's making things look not so great so what we can do to fix that is start adding in

our grass so let's select this tool here it's called the paint details tool and what we can do is actually paint various 3d objects whether it's grass or rocks or flowers or bushes pretty much anything you want to paint onto this terrain a 3d object you can do it using the paint details tool what we're going to do is go down to this edit details tab again you're not gonna be creating a new brush anytime you're thinking about a brush with unities terrain think about Thomas brush know think about a brush being an actual mask or a mat it's just telling unity what you want the shape to be of the 3d object that you're painting and I'll show you what I mean in just a second so let's go down here and click Edit details what we can do is create a new grass texture and you'll see this little window pop up here and fortunately because of those standard assets we imported we can actually find a 2d texture that's already ready for us

so let's type in grass and you'll notice this is the grass we want to use so we can double click on that and these various details here will skim through really quickly you can choose the very though you can choose the width that you want the grass to be and the height and it's sort of randomizes between a minimum and maximum you can choose the noise spread you can choose what you want the color of the healthy or dead grass to be tinting towards and then also billboard which means it's always going to face the player if we turn this off it won't always face the player and it'll kind of look kind of like paper grass so let's click Add and right away we can start adding in our grass now obviously we'll want to paint our grass not where this stone is there we go and you'll notice the grass is being culled slowly it looks kind of bad right now but as you start adding details into

your world you'll notice you don't really need to see grass that's far away so there's some grass what we can do is actually change the size of the brush so pretty small here we can also decide how many pieces of grass we want to paint using the opacity so we can bring it down pretty low and you'll notice it's not really painting anything is it you bring up the opacity there we go there we go and so if we wanted some bits and bits of grass in the actual road we could do it that way so we've got our grass painted and finally we can create another grass detail using add to grass texture and we're gonna choose the other grass texture which would be this one and click Add what you want to do is be sure you select it and then we can paint that grass and cause some variation in our grass pretty cool let's increase the opacity and the brush size let's just

create ton of grass let's fall into our world sorry I need to position my character so as we walk towards the grass you can see it's slowly coming into view pretty cool and you can see it even blows in the wind and we can control that in the settings of our terrain really really cool so our world is slowly starting to come together just with the built in unity tools and let's create some trees so let's go to our tree tool here paint some trees and let's go ahead and edit our trees and then we're gonna go to the built-in and then we're gonna find a tree that is included in the standard assets so as you can see we have three trees here just look for this little tree icon and you're gonna want to double click which one you want so the conifer actually looks really great so make sure your tree is selected

and you want to make sure that the tree density isn't too high so we're gonna decrease that a little bit and you can see our trees are starting to paint into our world and those are some pretty harsh shadows so we'll probably need to change that in just a bit so it's really good to paint sort of from the perspective of what you think the player is going to be seeing now the cool thing about these trees is you can paint a ton of trees and unity' won't slow down and the reason why is it's got an LOD group attached to it and I won't get into too much detail but what an LOD does is it basically tells unity to slowly decrease the quality of the tree as you zoom away so you can see that the truth the truth I can't talk so you can see that the trees are slowly changing they will eventually fade away there they go bye-bye so if we zoom in they slowly become 3d trees pretty cool so you could

paint them all over the place if you want it to all over and basically what its gonna do is just create a billboard of various pngs drop-down and we have a tree world and then we can create other trees let's create another tree and we're gonna go to a hey how about a conifer - cool pretty cool select our Conover here and Wow Thomas very nice these shadows for these trees are really harsh so let's just really quickly go into our directional light and decrease the strength of these shadows and as you can see we've got tons of trees I keep skydiving in why don't why don't I change that and some of you might be wondering Thomas how would I get those trees in the distance to not look so crappy well you could create stones or various bits of grass place them around

the tree so things don't look so obviously terrible you can also have some settings you can change here you can change the size of the brush density of the trees the tree height and lock the width to the height and what I want to show you now is how we can create a lake down at the bottom of this where would we put a lake here we go let's put one down here so let's go first off let's create some terrain so we're gonna raise the terrain up to about let's see here let's raise this one up this is just me trying to give you guys an example of how we're gonna do a lake and what's really cool about this is even if you place trees and grass and texture you can change the height of the terrain in the trees and the texture will move with your terrain pretty cool pretty cool okay so we can raise that up here

and now guys what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a lake or a pond so included in your standard assets you can include or you can search for water and you have all these cool prefabs again look for the prefabs and they're just this these square images here you'll see the icon it's a box so let's go to water for I really like water for simple we're gonna drag that into the scene ooh very nice and what I'm gonna do is just scale it and you can see why I created the terrain to raise up around it because if it was right here you see a clipping but we can actually sort of lower it down here and there's plenty of cool settings in our water for basic script that we can change what I want to change is the edge fade I think it's a little too smooth so now it's nice and crisp on the edges guys I want to show you how you can delete some of these

trees trees don't grow in water so what we're gonna do is select our tree and then if you hold shift you can erase those trees right but trees do grow around water don't they there we go and then to create some shoreline see you can just start figuring out what your world looks like don't worry about it you know don't worry about making things look perfect just have fun with it and you'll slowly see your world come to life oh man it's looking good you know grass doesn't grow in a lake does it so let's go ahead and go to our paint details tab just press shift make sure you select the grass and you can erase your grass and then paint it around the grass is a little bit sparse so let's go ahead and increase our target strength of one here now we can add a little bit more grass to the edges

of this water very nice it's kind of cozy isn't it and it's not perfect but overall guys this is how your terrain tool works inside of unity really beautiful now I'm gonna do a quick speedrun to show you guys how we can take this sort of generic looking terrain and just with some a couple image effects make it look absolutely gorgeous so let's go so with a couple image effects you can make your landscape just look absolutely incredible we have some bloom and some grain some color correction and some motion blur so if we hit play you'll notice that things just look really beautiful just with adding a couple image effects now obviously this isn't perfect guys but this is a very quick tutorial on how you can create terrain in unity thanks guys for watching

alright guys what did you think pretty cool unity has some incredible tools and the terrain tool is I guess one of the most important tools in your 3d Arsenal if you like this video please hit the subscribe button also leave a comment and hit the bell notification icon thingy to get notified of my new uploads also if you guys want to support you can wishlist my games using the links in the description and also support me on patreon that would really mean a lot thanks you [Music] you