Procedural Terrain Generation with Unity Updated for 2024

Learn how to program and work with:

• Voronoi Tessellation
• Midpoint Displacement
• Perlin Noise
• Splat Maps
• Trees and Vegetation
• Clouds
• Weather
• Erosion
• Water and new to 2024
• Working with Multiple Terrain Objects
• Dealing with URP and HDRP

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.

• Use various algorithmic approaches to create procedurally generated content.
• Manipulated terrain meshes with code to create realistic looking landscapes.
• Texture terrain meshes procedurally.
• Discuss the design principles involved in producing aesthetically pleasing terrains.
• Manipulate the render settings in Unity to produce better looking camera results.
• Create custom Unity windows and graphical user interface elements for use inside the Editor.