Unity Advanced: 3D Level Design

Name: Unity Advanced: 3D Level Design
Author: Ken Geary

Learn how to use terrain tools to paint layers and trees in Unity

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Course: On-Demand

Hello, welcome to this lesson in Unity. In these lessons, you'll learn how to block out your overall environment. Add materials and trees, then create an arena at the center of the level. Open Unity Hub. Unity version used for this series is Unity 2022.3. Be sure to use the LTS version of Unity 2022 for the best ability. Visual Studio Community 2022 will also be used, although you can use Visual Studio Community 2019 or higher. Create a new project, select 3D. Set your project folder location, and we'll name this project Advanced. Click Create Project. Add it to Projects Open. To make sure your layout looks the same as these tutorials, go to Window, Layouts, and select Default. We'll do some preliminary setup by creating some common folders. In the Project panel, open the Assets folder and create a Material folder. We'll also create a Script folder and a Prefab folder. This is a good practice for any project you work on. Because we're going to be adding terrain to this project, we'll create another folder and name it Terrain. Because this is a new project, it's a good idea to confirm that Visual Studio is set because your editor for coding. Open Edit, Preferences, click External Tools, and make sure your external script editor is selected for Visual Studio. Close the panel. We'll save this scene, so we'll go to File, Save As, go to the Scenes folder, and we'll name this layout. We need to get an idea of scale for our project. An easy way to do this is to first add a plane to the scene. Check any inspector that the plane is centered. If not, click the three dots and click Reset. Next, we'll add a Capsule. We'll move it up one unit in Y. A Capsule is two units in height, and a default unity unity is one meter per unit. That means the height of a Capsule is approximately the height of a humanoid character. A plane is 10 meters by 10 meters in size and has no depth in Y. A plane is about the size of a small room. We want to make our Reno area larger, so we'll block out this space by selecting the plane. And we'll scale by 6 and X and Z. Now let's add a terrain and see how it compares to our plane in size. Open the GameObject menu, select 3D Object, Terrain. We'll rename this terrain Landscape. You select the terrain, hit F2. That's a shortcut for renaming. Next, we'll do a little cleanup. We'll drag this new terrain into our Trains folder. Next, select Landscape in the hierarchy. Over your mouse over the scene panel, and press F. To mount your mouse wheel, we'll hold the Alt key and click and drag it the right mouse. The terrain is very big and you can barely see the plane. Default terrain size is 2000 wide by 2000 long by 600 I, which is larger than what we need for these tutorials. Note you can add adjacent terrains to make larger open worlds. With the Landscape selected, in the Inspector, you'll see the Trains section with several tools. The first creates adjacent terrains. Next one's Paint Terrain, Paint Trees, Paint Details, and Terrain Settings. We'll click on Terrain Settings, scroll down to Mesh Resolution and change terrain with the 500, Length to 500, and Height to 400. We'll scroll back up and we'll go to Position Terrain so it's centered. So we'll make the Exposition half of the 500, which is a minus 250, Y will set the minus 0.5, and Z minus 250. We'll zoom back in a bit. We needed a little offset in Y so the plane does not intersect with the terrain. Next, click the Paint Terrain icon. This tool has a drop-down menu to change paint settings. First, we'll change the terrain height. Select Set Height from the drop-down menu. We'll select 10, and we'll click Flat and All. This is actually going to raise our terrain up to 10 units, and with that a height, you'd only be able to build up your terrain and not be able to make trenches, rivers, or lakes. Don't worry that we no longer see our plane and capsule. We'll fix that next. Click the drop-down menu and select Raise or Lower Terrain. You'll see selection of brush shapes similar to Photoshop or other paint programs. Click the second brush. This will give a smooth transition. Hover your mouse in the scene panel, and you'll see a widget that shows the size and the fall-off of the brush. Click and drag around the outer edge of the terrain to get a feel for creating hills and mountains. You can change your brush size by clicking and dragging. Control Z to undo. Change the size smaller, and the size like this should be good. The brush opacity is how much the terrain raises the lowers. You may want to keep the number a little smaller, so you can just add to it in steps. Use a little more control over sculpting. I'll bring this up a little bit more. Hold it down to Shift key, we'll sculpt downwards. If we click in the center and paint a small area, you'll see our plane and capsule again. Hold down Shift, and there it is. Undo a few steps. Now I know where our area is, and hold down Shift. Click and drag, and then we can see our arena. I'm also going to orient, so the Z direction is pointing away from us. X is pointing to the right, and you can see the lighting a little bit better this way. I'm going to change these mountains. I'm holding down to Shift key. I'll add a little more terrain to the back, and that should be fine. You can undo any paint stroke by pressing Ctrl and Z. Once again, you use a slider to change the brush size and opacity. It's recommended to keep the opacity low so you can build up slowly. Try a different brush to break up the landscape and add more detail. I'll use this brush here. I'm going to load the opacity a bit. Now this is making these hills and mountains a little more rugged. Feel free to return to this menu to customize your landscape. Save. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how to add layer textures and trees to our landscape in Unity. Thanks for watching!

Advanced Provider : Ken Geary 3 Lessons · 25m in English

Course Description

In these lessons you will learn about using terrain systems. We will explore how to shape terrain, adding layered textures and populating the terrain with trees using a paint-on surface toolset. By the end of these lessons, you will be able to create world levels for all your characters and objects to interact with.

These lessons will cover how to use the terrain tools to sculpt a large environment with hills, mountains, and valleys using different brush types to add detail. We’ll go over how to download terrain texture assets and use them to paint ground and grass layers. You will also learn how to create a tree from scratch using Unity’s procedural tree tools to add branches and leaves. Then you’ll use the tree you created to paint groups of trees of varying sizes across areas of your terrain. Next, you’ll learn how to clear an area in the center of the terrain in order to build an arena for players and NPCs to interact. You’ll use the arena floor as an AI Navmesh area, create walls around the perimeter, and then scatter additional walls inside the arena so the player and NPCs will have to navigate around them. Finally, you’ll learn how to add textures will to the walls to enhance the visual quality of the environment.

What You'll Learn

Sculpt terrain into hills, mountains, and valleys using different brush types to add detail
Import and paint layered ground and grass textures onto the terrain surface
Create a procedural tree from scratch using Unity's tree tools to add branches and leaves
Paint groups of trees of varying sizes across areas of the landscape using brush tools
Build an arena by clearing the terrain center, setting an AI Navmesh floor, and adding perimeter and interior walls
Add textures to the arena walls to enhance the visual quality of the environment

Key Takeaways

Unity's terrain system lets you shape a large environment and populate it with trees using a paint-on surface toolset.
Terrain texture assets can be downloaded and used to paint layered ground and grass surfaces.
Unity's procedural tree tools let you build a tree from scratch and then paint groups of it at varying sizes across the terrain.
An arena cleared in the center of the terrain can serve as an AI Navmesh area enclosed by perimeter and scattered interior walls for player and NPC navigation.
Completing these lessons enables you to create world levels for characters and objects to interact with.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I be able to do after completing this course?

By the end of these lessons you will be able to create world levels for all your characters and objects to interact with, including sculpting terrain, painting layered textures, creating procedural trees, and building an arena.

What topics do the lessons cover?

The lessons cover blocking out the environment, adding textures and trees, and creating the arena, including using terrain tools to sculpt hills, mountains, and valleys, painting ground and grass layers, creating and painting procedural trees, and building an arena with an AI Navmesh floor and textured walls.

How are trees created and placed in this course?

You learn to create a tree from scratch using Unity's procedural tree tools to add branches and leaves, then use that tree to paint groups of trees of varying sizes across areas of your terrain.

What skills does this course focus on?

The course focuses on painting, tree diagrams, and ZBrush, applied to 3D level design in Unity.