• Products
  • Solutions
  • Made with Unity
  • Learning
  • Support & Services
  • Community
  • Asset Store
  • Get Unity

UNITY ACCOUNT

You need a Unity Account to shop in the Online and Asset Stores, participate in the Unity Community and manage your license portfolio. Login Create account
  • Blog
  • Forums
  • Answers
  • Evangelists
  • User Groups
  • Beta Program
  • Advisory Panel

Navigation

  • Home
  • Products
  • Solutions
  • Made with Unity
  • Learning
  • Support & Services
  • Community
    • Blog
    • Forums
    • Answers
    • Evangelists
    • User Groups
    • Beta Program
    • Advisory Panel

Unity account

You need a Unity Account to shop in the Online and Asset Stores, participate in the Unity Community and manage your license portfolio. Login Create account

Language

  • Chinese
  • Spanish
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Portuguese
  • Ask a question
  • Spaces
    • Default
    • Help Room
    • META
    • Moderators
    • Topics
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Badges
  • Home /
avatar image
0
Question by Rajiv Babu · Nov 28, 2012 at 08:02 AM · mayamodeling

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.

Comment
Add comment
10 |3000 characters needed characters left characters exceeded
▼
  • Viewable by all users
  • Viewable by moderators
  • Viewable by moderators and the original poster
  • Advanced visibility
Viewable by all users

2 Replies

· Add your reply
  • Sort: 
avatar image
0

Answer by Cygon4 · Nov 28, 2012 at 12:50 PM

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.

Comment
Add comment · Share
10 |3000 characters needed characters left characters exceeded
▼
  • Viewable by all users
  • Viewable by moderators
  • Viewable by moderators and the original poster
  • Advanced visibility
Viewable by all users
avatar image
0

Answer by Rajiv Babu · Nov 29, 2012 at 09:53 AM

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

Comment
Add comment · Show 2 · Share
10 |3000 characters needed characters left characters exceeded
▼
  • Viewable by all users
  • Viewable by moderators
  • Viewable by moderators and the original poster
  • Advanced visibility
Viewable by all users
avatar image Cygon4 · Nov 29, 2012 at 10:27 AM 0
Share

This is not a forum but a Q&A site - it works differently, you should use the comment function instead of adding an answer ;)

But yes, modeling the terrain in Maya would take up more space. A 512x512 height map in Unity would be about (512x512x3 =) 85 KiB. Creating an identical terrain as a Maya model would at least take (512x512x8x4 =) 8192 KiB, assuming each vertex has a float (4 byte) position, texture coordinate and normal.

avatar image Rajiv Babu · Nov 30, 2012 at 01:26 AM 0
Share

Aah I didnt notice :)...thanks for pointing out though

Your answer

Hint: You can notify a user about this post by typing @username

Up to 2 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 524.3 kB each and 1.0 MB total.

Welcome to Unity Answers

The best place to ask and answer questions about development with Unity.

To help users navigate the site we have posted a site navigation guide.

If you are a new user to Unity Answers, check out our FAQ for more information.

Make sure to check out our Knowledge Base for commonly asked Unity questions.

If you are a moderator, see our Moderator Guidelines page.

We are making improvements to UA, see the list of changes.



Follow this Question

Answers Answers and Comments

11 People are following this question.

avatar image avatar image avatar image avatar image avatar image avatar image avatar image avatar image avatar image avatar image avatar image

Related Questions

A node in a childnode? 1 Answer

Tutorials for modeling program? 1 Answer

Unity Backface Culling 3 Answers

problem with animation from Maya in unity 0 Answers

Normal Map baking, simple question? 0 Answers

  • Anonymous
  • Sign in
  • Create
  • Ask a question
  • Spaces
  • Default
  • Help Room
  • META
  • Moderators
  • Explore
  • Topics
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Badges