Book Image

Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development - Second Edition

By : Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo
Book Image

Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development - Second Edition

By: Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo

Overview of this book

Learning how to use Unity is the quickest way to creating a full game, but that’s not all you can do with this simple, yet comprehensive suite of video game development tools – Unity is just as useful for creating AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and practical games for training and education. Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development outlines a practical journey to creating your first full game from the ground up, building it step-by-step and applying your knowledge as you progress. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will teach you how to develop the game using several Unity tools. As you advance, you will learn how to use the Unity engine, create simple scripts using C#, integrate graphics, sound, and animations, and manipulate physics to create interesting mechanics for your game. You’ll be able to apply all the knowledge that you gain to a real-world game. Later chapters will show you how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs efficiently. Finally, you'll work with Unity's AR tools to create AR experiences for 3D apps and games. By the end of this Unity book, you will have created a complete game and built a solid foundation in using a wide variety of Unity tools.
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Our First Level
7
Section 2 – Improving Graphics and Sound
16
Section 3 – Scripting Level Interactivity with C#
24
Section 4 – Releasing Your Game

Creating a Landscape with Terrain

So far, we have used Cubes to generate our level prototype, but we also learned that those Shapes sometimes cannot represent all possible objects we might need. Imagine something irregular, such as a full terrain with hills, canyons, and rivers. This would be a nightmare to create using cubes. Another option would be to use 3D modeling software, but the problem with that is that the generated model would be so big and so detailed that it wouldn't perform well, even on high-end PCs. In this scenario, we need to learn how to use Terrain, which we will do in this first section of this 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 us define the heights of our terrain.

Discussing Height Maps

If we create...