From Blueprint to Reality: Building with Terrain and ProBuilder

Now that we’ve grasped all the necessary concepts to use Unity, let’s start designing our first level of the game. The idea in this chapter is to learn how to use Terrain tools to create the landscape of our game and then use ProBuilder to create the 3D mesh of the base with greater detail than using cubes. By the end of the chapter, you will be able to create a prototype of any kind of scene and try out your idea before actually implementing it with the final graphics.

Specifically, we will examine the following concepts in this chapter:

• Defining our game concept
• Creating a landscape with Terrain Tools
• Creating shapes with ProBuilder

Let’s start by talking about our game concept, which will help us draft the first-level environment.

Defining our game concept

Before even adding the first cube to our scene, it is good to have an idea of what we are going to create, as we will need to understand the basic concept of our game to start designing the first level. Throughout this book, we will be creating a shooter game, in which the player will be fighting against waves of enemies trying to destroy the player’s base.

This base will be a complex in a (not so) secret location bordered by mountains:

Figure 3.1: Our finished game

We will be defining the mechanics of our game as we progress through the book, but with this basic high-level concept of the game, we can start thinking about how to create a mountainous landscape and a placeholder player’s base.

With that in mind, in the next section of this chapter, we will learn how to use Unity’s Terrain Tools to create our scene’s landscape.

Creating a landscape with Terrain

So far, we have used cubes to generate our level prototype, but we also learned that cubes sometimes cannot represent all possible objects we could need. Imagine something irregular, such as a full terrain with hills, canyons, and rivers. This would be a nightmare to create using cubes, given the irregular shapes you find in the terrain.

Another option would be to use 3D modeling software, but the problem with that is that the generated model will be so big and so detailed that it won’t perform well, even on high-end PCs. In this scenario, we need to learn how to use Unity’s Terrain system, which we will do in this first section of the chapter.

In this section, we will cover the following concepts related to terrains:

• Discussing Height Maps
• Creating and configuring Height Maps
• Authoring Height Maps
• Adding Height Map details

Let’s start by talking about Height Maps, whose textures help...

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Now that we've grasped all the necessary concepts to use Unity, let's start designing our first level of the game. The idea in this chapter is to learn how to use Terrain Tools to create the landscape of our game and then use ProBuilder to create the 3D mesh of the base with greater detail than using cubes. By the end of the chapter, you will be able to create a prototype of any kind of scene and try out your idea before actually implementing it with the final graphics.Specifically, we will examine the following concepts in this chapter:

• Defining our game concept
• Creating a landscape with Terrain Tools
• Creating shapes with ProBuilder

Let's start by talking about our game concept, which will help us draft the first-level environment.