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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)?

Jee
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If you don't use procedural generation to generate your terrain you will have to design it yourself. This in its self isn't really an issue, however if you are going for an endless map you could run into problems.

If you do use procedural generation to generate your terrain you are still a little bit in control of how the terrain will look like, but far less then you would if you were to make it yourself from scratch. It will also be a lot more random. human beings tend to have certain biases.

Jee
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mowie2
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    Not sure if I totally get your point. Are you saying that you should use the Terrain GameObject if you're just designing a specific map and that if you are doing procedural generation you should make the terrain from scratch? – Jee Jul 13 '20 at 22:10
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    Any further thoughts? – Jee Jul 20 '20 at 16:54
  • I completely forgot about this. What I'm saying is that Terrain GameObject lets YOU be in control of how the terrain looks. Procedural generation takes some of that control away. – mowie2 Jul 23 '20 at 21:35
  • No worries. I see you're point. But with that being said, is there any real benefit to creating a custom terrain using procedural generation? Considering you can do the same thing with the Terrain GameObject, why not just use the GameObject with procedural generation? – Jee Jul 24 '20 at 05:17
  • That is a possibility as well. – mowie2 Jul 25 '20 at 11:09