Make a terrain in Unity or outside program?

I was wondering which would be better graphically and performance wise. I’ve tried searching around and haven’t really seen any opinions so any help is welcomed. =P

You can use experience of Piranha bytes. In Gothic 1,2,3 and Risen they used hand made terrain. They modeled it in 3ds max and use as mesh. Of course such terrain looks cooler and it is extreamly complicated to manage. I have no idea how they splitted terrain work between team members. Maybe that’s why they leave this idea and use heighmap in Risen 2 and 3. By using additional mesh you can make look of not height mapped terrain like Skyrim and Risen 2: compound of big rocks and stuff like that.

And of course built in system in Unity works much much faster than any 3rd part plugins and you have version to version compatibility.

Hey, I know I am new but In my opinion doing the terrain in unity is faster and easier, but more detail and better performance it is recommended to use an outside program, I personally use 3ds max.
Hope it helped!
Edwin

There is a built-in terrain editor. I made a huge map with it. I think you import the terrain asset, then you should be able to create one by going to the “GameObject” tab, then “Create other”, then near the bottom, there is a terrain button. Click the terrain option, then click the terrain. When you click the terrain, you can go under the inspector and find lots of tools to make the terrain.
Happy game writing!

One is not better performance wise. They are both just a pile of vertex data at the end of the day. Unity does have built in clipping which is nice but you can just cut your terrain in Max/Maya.

Do you need holes in your terrain?

Then you have to use a external FBX.

Do you know how to 3d model and UV?

Then you have to use Unity.

Regards,

You could use Worldmachine as an external editing program.

For use in Unity, I’d suggest using the link below.

https://code.google.com/p/unityterraintoolkit/downloads/detail?name=Terrain%20Toolkit%201.0.2.zip&can=2&q=

This is what I use. Select your terrain, then do Component>terrain>terraintoolkit

Hope this helps