Book Image

Hands-On Unity 2020 Game Development

By : Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo
Book Image

Hands-On Unity 2020 Game Development

By: Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo

Overview of this book

Over the years, the Unity game engine has extended its scope from just being about creating video games to building AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and serious games for training and education. Its features for implementing gameplay, graphics, and customization using C# programming make Unity a comprehensive platform for developing professional-level, rich experiences. With this book, you'll be able to build impressive Unity projects in a step-by-step manner and apply your knowledge of Unity concepts to create a real-world game. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to develop your first complete game using a variety of Unity tools. As you make progress, you'll learn how to make the most of the Unity Editor and create scripts using the C# programming language. This Unity game development book will then take you through integrating graphics, sound, and animations and manipulating physics to create impressive mechanics for your games. You'll also learn how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs in a performant way. Finally, you'll get to grips with Unity's AR Foundation for creating AR experiences for 3D apps and games. By the end of this book, you'll have developed a complete game and will have built a solid foundation using Unity's tooling ecosystem to develop game projects of any scale.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
20
Chapter 20: Building the Project

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 could 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 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 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 talking about Height Maps, whose textures help us define the heights of our terrain.

Discussing Height Maps

If we create a giant...