Procedural Terrain Generation with Unity Updated for 2024!
- Descrição
- Currículo
- FAQ
- Revisões
Updated for Unity in 2024
The creation of beautiful virtual terrains isn’t just the domain of the artist, but also of the programmer. What if you could use your programming skills in C# to manipulate a mesh to create realistic landscapes, using algorithms developed by researchers studying landscape formation and erosion? Well now you can.
In this course, Penny introduces procedural terrain generation techniques using her internationally acclaimed holistic teaching style and expertise from over 25 years of teaching, research and work in games and computer graphics. Throughout the course you will follow along with hands-on workshops, designed to teach you the fundamental techniques used for generating realistic virtual landscapes.
Learn how to program and work with:
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Voronoi Tessellation
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Midpoint Displacement
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Perlin Noise
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Splat Maps
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Trees and Vegetation
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Clouds
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Weather
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Erosion
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Water and new to 2024
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Working with Multiple Terrain Objects
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Dealing with URP and HDRP
Contents and Overview
The course begins by examining the nature of a landscape and the design considerations you should include in making decisions on structure, colour and vegetation. You’ll learn what makes for a natural looking terrain, so you can replicate this in Unity.
Following on, we will examine some of the most popular algorithms used in generating terrains (including many fractal and tessellation techniques) that can be used together, to form random and yet convincing mountainous vistas.
Once you are confident with landscape formation, we’ll move onto texturing the terrain with a variety of images that can be placed via splatmaps onto differing heights and gradients. Then, continue to decorate the terrain with trees, rocks and grass placed with an algorithmic approach before investigating erosion methods, that will add that extra level of realism.
The course concludes with the development of a cloud generation system and an exploration of particle systems for adding rain, snow and other atmospheric effects to the finalised landscape.
Throughout, we’ll be developing our own custom Unity editor code that will allow you to build extra functionality and structure into the Unity Inspector, as well as create Editor Windows of your very own.
What students are saying about Penny’s courses:
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Penny is an excellent instructor and she does a great job of breaking down complex concepts into smaller, easy-to-understand topics.
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Penny’s teaching style is exceptionally well-motivated and illustrated.
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This course is awesome. The lecturer explains everything you need to know and encourages you to experiment and challenge yourself.
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How to Study This Course -
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Join the H3D Student CommunityH3D has a bustling online student community. Here's how to get involved.
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Contacting H3D
How to contact us
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Welcome
This video is a short introduction to the course content.
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FAQs
This article addresses common general questions about my courses.
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Getting Started: Setting up Unity for Terrain Generation
In this lecture students will learn how to get setup in Unity for different renderer pipelines to create a Terrain object. An introduction to the built in terrain tools will then be covered including height creation and texturing.
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Manually Adding Texture Layers
In this lecture students will learn how materials are created and used to colour a terrain.
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Landscape Reproduction Challenge
Landscape Reproduction Challenge
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A Word about Brushes
In this video we will discuss the settings that a brush in the terrain tools can have to give differing surface effects in addition to looking at the tiling size of materials.
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Adding Trees to a Terrain
In this video students will learn how to add trees to a terrain as well as create random variations in the trees.
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Adding Details to a Terrain
In this video students will learn how to add extra details, such as grass, rocks or bushes to the surface of a terrain.
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Design Principles for Terrain Aesthetics
In this video students will learn about the design principles that make for a realistic and well balanced looking terrain.
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Important Terrain Settings
In this lecture students will learn about some of the key terrain values that we will be working with throughout the course and what their values mean.
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Getting Ready to Create a Custom Editor
In this lecture students will learn how to setup their project to create a custom inspector editor that they can use to begin working on procedural generation of the terrain.
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Generating Random Heights Part 1
In this lecture students will learn how to begin their first procedural generation algorithm to generate random heights on the terrain.
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Generating Random Heights Part 2
In this lecture students will complete the code to create random heights and be challenged to write code that can reset the terrain heights back to 0.
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Loading Height Map Data from an Image
In this lecture students will learn how to use a greyscale image to set the heights of a terrain from the colour values of the pixels.
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Test Your Knowledge: Height Setting
In this lecture students will be challenged on their knowledge of heightmap and asked to write methods that work with the height values contained within.
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Want to Refactor?
In this lecture students will be challenged to think about how they can refactor the codebase as they are developing it.
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Noise Theory
In this lecture students will learn about the mathematical theory of noise and how it can be used in generating realistic terrain heights.
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Implementing Simple Perlin Noise
In this lecture students will learn how to implement a simple Perlin noise algorithm and explore it's variety of settings for different terrain effects.
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Brownian Motion
In this lecture students will learn about the Brownian Motion algorithm and write up code that combines several Perlin Noise curves into one.
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A Quick Note about the GUITable Code
In this lecture we will quickly cover some helpful code that can be used with the GUI Editor to improve the layout.
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Multiple Perlin Noise
In this lecture students will learn how to use more than one noise wave to create more interesting looking landscapes.
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Test Your Knowledge: Ridge Noise
In this video students will be challenged to create a ridge noise method that will replicated a desert scene with sharpened ridges on sand dunes.
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What is Voronoi Tessellation
In this video students will learn about voronoi tessellation and how the effect can be seen in all manner of natural phenomena.
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Creating Mountain Peaks
In this video students will be challenged to start writing the code for a voronoi algorithm before Penny demonstrates how to add random mountain peaks and build up the slopes.
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Modifying Mountain Slopes
In this lecture students will learn about differing mathematical formula that can be integrated into terrain generation to add extra interest to a plane landscape.
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Multiple Random Peaks
In this video students will be challenged to add further controls to their voronoi tessellation algorithm and be shown how to use them to make the landscapes appear more realistic.
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Adding a Choice of Function Types
This lecture will take you through the process of integrating multiple functions into the code to use with the Voronoi peaks.
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Test Your Knowledge: Voronoi & Perlin
In this video students will be challenged to modify the Voronoi algorithm to include a Perlin noise calculation to give interest to the sides of peaks.
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Introduction to Midpoint Displacement
In this video students will learn how the midpoint displacement algorithm works.
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The Diamond Step
In this video students will follow along as the code for a diamond step algorithm is added to the terrain generation code.
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The Square Step Method
In this video students will learn how to extend the midpoint displacement algorithm by implementing the square step method.
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Smoothing Part 1
In this video students will learn how to use a blurring algorithm like that used on images, to smooth a terrain.
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Smoothing Part 2
In this video students will follow along as the smoothing algorithm is completed.
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Splatmaps
In this video students will learn how to setup up their project code ready to add textures onto the terrain. The concept of splatmaps will be introduced and explained.
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Coding for Terrain Layers
In this video students will learn how to load a texture to become a splatmap and then paste that texture across the surface of the terrain.
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Specifying Texture Heights
In this video students will learn how to set differing heights for placing the different splatmaps.
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Overlapping with Noise
In this video students will learn how to use Perlin Noise to overlap textures where they intersect at the height cutoff settings.
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Blending Texture Overlaps
In this video students will discover how to blend the alpha values used for the splatmaps in areas where textures overlap.
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Controlling Tile Size
In this video students will learn how to add tile sizing and offsets to the terrain layers.
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Adding Normal Maps to Terrain Layers
In this video students will be challenged to add a normal map to the terrain layer.
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Running out of Room in the Inspector Editor?
In this video students will learn how to make more room in the Inspector by adding a scrollbar for when the terrain editor becomes to large.
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Texturing on a Steep Terrain
In this video students will learn how to add textures on different parts of a terrain based on the steepness.
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Test Your Knowledge: Texturing
In this video students will be challenged to come up with a way to set black areas left on a terrain to a default texture.
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Working with Tree Prototypes Part 1
In this lecture students will start to begin writing the editor code for placing trees onto the surface of the terrain.
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Working with Tree Prototypes Part 2
In this lecture students will learn how to set the heights at which trees are placed on the surface of the terrain.
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Working with Layers
In this video students will learn how to programmatically add a tag to a game object.
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Setting Tree Heights
In this video students will learn how to use raycasting to position trees correctly on the terrain.
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Test Your Knowledge: Vegetation
In this video students will be challenged to use the minimum and maximum values for tree growth at heights and slopes to place the trees on the terrain.
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Adding Details
In this lecture students will learn how to setup their projects to start adding details onto the surface of the terrain.
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Setting Heights and Slopes for Detail Positions
In this lecture students will learn how to setup the code for determining the heights and slopes for the positioning of details.
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Terrain Detail Setting Specifics
In this lecture students will learn about the differing detail scatter modes available on the terrain and how to code for each one.
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Working with Detail Properties
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Adding Water
In this video students will learn how to add a URP water plane into the scene and use the Inspector Editor to position and size it.
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Adding Water Via the Terrain Editor
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Erosion
In this video students will learn how erosion moulds the face of a terrain for realistic effects.
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Rain
In this video student will learn how rain erosion can be simulated on a procedural terrain.
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Thermal
In this video students will learn how thermal effects are added to the erosion of the surface of a terrain.
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Tidal
In this video students will learn how to use the level of the water to erode away the terrain at the shoreline.
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River
In this video students will learn how to create a river system that erodes away at the terrain surface.
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Wind
In this video students will learn how wind erodes a terrain and how it can be simulated with code.
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Wind Direction
In this video students will learn how to simulate wind erosion by considering the direction the wind comes from.
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Test Your Knowledge: Canyon Challenge
In this video students will be challenged to use the techniques learned in this section to develop their own canyon creation tool.
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Fog
In this video students will learn how to add different types of fog to a scene and gain an understanding about how fog and the sky work together.
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A Word About Clouds
In this video students will learn about a variety of ways to place clouds into their scene and go through the practical steps to add a cloud plane and skydome.
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Making Your Own Clouds Part 1
In this video students will learn how to setup their project to create a cloud toy like function in the terrain editor.
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Making Your Own Clouds Part 2
In this video students will learn how to create multiple clouds and work with particle systems to move the clouds across the sky.
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Cloud Management
In this video students will get the clouds moving across the terrain at different speeds and set them to respawn at the starting location.
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Cloud Painting
In this video students will learn how to apply different colours to the clouds to give them a darker shade on the bottom surface.
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Cloud Shadows
In this video students will learn how to use the URP Decal Projector to cast shadows onto the surface of the terrain from the clouds.
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Cloud Challenge
In this video students will be challenged to have the clouds set to random sizes between a minimum and maximum value.
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Producing Rain Particles Part 1
In this video students will learn how to get setup to create rain with a particle system.
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Producing Rain Particles Part 2
In this video students will follow along to complete the rain particle system complete with splashback from the terrain.
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Producing Rain Particles Part 3
In this video students will learn how to add a first person controller to their terrain and attach the rain particle system to it.
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Working with Multiple Terrains
In this video students will learn how to create multiple terrain objects and then begin adding perlin noise to modify their heights.
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Adding Perlin Heights to Multiple Terrains
In this video students will learn how to put world based Perlin noise height values onto a system with multiple terrains.
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Fixing Perlin Height Alignment
In this video students will learn why they can get Perlin height alignment issues when working across multiple terrains.
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Joining the Seams
In this video students will learn how to ensure the seams where terrains meet have exactly the same height values.
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Offsetting Perlin
In this video students will learn how to avoid the perlin noise mirroring issue that occurs around (0,0,0).
