Do you know how Unity handles these neighbor terrains in terms of optimizations? Are there LODS for neighbor terrains that are a certain distance away, or loading/ unloading of chunks? I would love to use the terrain system, but I find that to create ginormous terrains, I usually end up building my own quad tree implementation with chunk loading.
Neighbour terrains allow you to both increase the resolution of the control maps, and to share settings like textures. They'll auto unload like any other object from either distance culling or frustrum culling. Terrains actually handle LODs internally pretty well by drawing a less dense mesh further away. You can change the distance it does that by going into the terrain settings and increasing the "pixel error" figure. An amount of 15-30 will see mid distance become a lot lower res. From there you can change the "Base Map Distance" which changes how far away terrain textures are rendered full res or using a lower reference base map image. Default is 1000 units. I'd suggest upping the base map to 2k or 4k res and then decrease the base map distance down to 120-200. That'll be a big boost in terrain performance and neighbour terrains will then use the lower res map AND poly count.
I have never used terrains, but this series of yours makes me want to use them!
the smooth height tool is not working , how can i fix that
Are you shift clicking to sample a height?
And then making sure your opacity is high enough to make a difference. Or it could take more brush strokes.
Do you know how Unity handles these neighbor terrains in terms of optimizations? Are there LODS for neighbor terrains that are a certain distance away, or loading/ unloading of chunks? I would love to use the terrain system, but I find that to create ginormous terrains, I usually end up building my own quad tree implementation with chunk loading.
Neighbour terrains allow you to both increase the resolution of the control maps, and to share settings like textures. They'll auto unload like any other object from either distance culling or frustrum culling.
Terrains actually handle LODs internally pretty well by drawing a less dense mesh further away. You can change the distance it does that by going into the terrain settings and increasing the "pixel error" figure. An amount of 15-30 will see mid distance become a lot lower res.
From there you can change the "Base Map Distance" which changes how far away terrain textures are rendered full res or using a lower reference base map image. Default is 1000 units. I'd suggest upping the base map to 2k or 4k res and then decrease the base map distance down to 120-200.
That'll be a big boost in terrain performance and neighbour terrains will then use the lower res map AND poly count.