A : If you are a senior Unity graphics programmer or an AI or Machine Learning expert and looking for collaboration, contact us.
A : Currently, the only water area that can’t be generated are “oceans” and “big seas” which are coming in future versions. However, if lakes are not generated, that may be because the WaterGenerator node is not there or disabled or you have issues downloading landcover data for it to create lakes/rivers.
A : “3rd Party Compatibility” in TW is a general statement as it operates on top of Unity’s built-in terrain system. It means any derived solution from Unity’s terrain system will work alongside TW. TerraWorld will also have editing tools in so it conforms and updates whenever the user changes elements in the scene (e.g. manually creating a road on the map and want to filter trees’ areas). It will also include built-in road and spline tools to generate road systems in the future.

A : Yes, TW supports any shader/material workflow user wishes to have since all scatter nodes take a prefab for rendering and do everything else in the background using Unity’s own rendering pipeline. Also, TW comes with a custom standard shader to support Procedural Snow, Wind Simulation, Double Sided Rendering & DX11 Tessellation suited for vegetation or any other objects you may think of.
TW comes with built-in optimization techniques to increase performance in larger scenes as shown in this video :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UbyeSBm4iY
For terrains, they are normal Unity terrains, so you can change their materials through its “Terrain Settings” inspector any time you want.

A : You can use VS or VSPro along with terrains generated using TW. So you can just disable vegetation creation in TerraWorld and let the VS plugin do vegetation rendering.
A : “Heightmap Source” node is going to be improved in the next version to also support heightmaps from existing terrains in scene and also user custom heigtmap data files so that the world conforms to the heightmap changes.
A : Currently, generated worlds are only limited to a single main terrain and a single Background terrain covering world bounds. Multi-terrain and parallel processing on them is planned and will be available soon.
A : Having colliders and bending feature in vegetation models is planned and will be added as soon as the new vegetation rendering system is out.
How does performance differ in TerraWorld scenes? A : Performance is higher when in Game mode compared to Editor and is higher in Builds compared to in-engine Play or Edit modes.
How the generated world is scaled in Unity engine? A : Each unit in Unity is considered to be 1 meter by default, so a 10km x 10km world/terrain will cover a 10000 x 10000 region in units centered at 3D space origin (0, 0, 0) in world space. This leads to easier placement/editing in generated scenes.
How Volumetric Fog is done? A : Volumetric Fog implementation is based on Unity’s Adam demo
How Volumetric Lighting & Atmospheric Scattering is done? A : Volumetric Lighting & Atmospheric Scattering implementation is based on Unity’s Blacksmith demo.

A : Trees and vegetation models can be generated and placed by “GPU Instance Scatter” nodes for the best performance.
So you can apply changes and modify the area and other parameters in the generated patches holding models using this tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oXzjkwWHu4
In addition, placed objects can come in 3 ways, GPU Instances, normal Gameobjects and Terrain Trees. If it’s a gameobject, then it’s easily editable and if it’s a terrain tree object then it can be edited through Unity’s terrain settings (brushes). Each type of these 3 scatter nodes can be replaced with each other, so if you need gameobjects instead of GPU instances, then go and edit graph nodes to suit your needs.

Is it possible to use masks to avoid generating objects (like on roads, inside houses, etc) in certain places? A : TerraWorld has internal masking system for area definition used by nodes but the next version comes with a dedicated mask node where users can insert their own masks to filter areas. Also, TW utilizes Unity’s object layers system to detect underlying surfaces or objects through a special raycast system to decide on placement in a scene. There is also scene view mask painter in our pipeline where the user can paint masked areas using a brush in the editor.
Is TerraWorld available as a free trial version? A : No, TerraWorld does not come with any free trial versions.
Is TerraWorld Platform-Independent? A : TerraWorld is in Unity so platform compatibility is the same as Unity’s. Simply switch build platform from Unity’s Build Settings menu and build for that platform. Keep in mind that specific features such as DX11 tessellation, GPU Instancing & compute shaders are supported in newer devices.

A : There are 2 reasons for this, 1st one is that probably the terrain surface has been tessellated using DX11 Tessellation and since the vertex alignment only lives in GPU, so the Physics system does not detect tessellated geometry because Physics is a CPU only implementation. The second reason for this can be that the “Terrain Collider” on terrain object is disabled.

We have already developed a GPU Collision system suited for tessellated terrain surfaces but still not in production level due to Unity’s outdated mesh API (It is improved in 2020 Alpha though) in updating procedural mesh colliders. We plan to have this feature as part of TW soon.

Watch the following videos to see it in action :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-mFcwlOo7Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hil9AKMOGk

Satellite Imagery on terrain is blurry and in low resolution! A : Satellite Imagery resolution can be adjusted via “Satellite Image” node in the “Colormap” tab. These data are acquired by multiple aerospace companies such as ESRI, NASA, Google, Bing, DigitalGlobe… and fed into the servers, so the resolution may vary in different Earth locations.
A : Elevation & Imagery data in TW is coming from ESRI servers with the highest available resolution data in global coverage. Consider all the challenges aerospace companies are facing to acquire these data and process them for usage. This leads to having the data in different resolutions for different areas where some places are in centimeter quality while other places have their quality in several meters that are stitched together to create a seamless data server. You can go to the “Heightmap Source” & “Satellite Image Source” nodes to change their resolutions to a higher one. Consider that the area size and heightmap/imagery resolution stick together so the bigger the area is, the lower the resolution per meter gets.

A : TerraLand only creates real-world terrains using heightmaps and satellite images acquired from ESRI servers without further processing but TerraWorld goes further and enhance heightmaps, texturing & splatmapping, rendering and analyzing terrains along with automatic procedural level designing of generated worlds by placing objects, GPU instances, vegetation rendering, clouds rendering, custom terrain and object shaders for high-end rendering, VFX settings and…

Some of the main features in TerraWold are:

• Day-Night cycle with auto dynamic lighting
• Procedural Snow
• Wind Simulation
• Semi-Volumetric Clouds
• Atmospheric Scattering & Volumetric Lighting
• Volumetric Horizon Fog
• High-density vegetation rendering using GPU Instancing
• High-density 3D assets placement throughout the entire scene
• Automatic generation of lakes and rivers
• Massive collection of plug and play assets
• Compatible with Unity’s terrain system and any other 3rd party assets

Tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHZjBewgCVWfFqGb8a0FrRrUz_X3HgRo_
Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHZjBewgCVWeD9HqBmESf-wmlMXJpz4sl

What are added features in Terra_Standard shader? A : Terra_Standard shader in TerraWorld is based on Unity’s Standard material plus features of Snow, Wind, Double Sided rendering and Tessellation suitable for any objects ranging from opage geometry to vegetation rendering in scene.
What is “Background Terrain” feature in TerraWorld and how can it cover horizon level and far viewing distances! A : Background Terrain in TW is there to fill in the gaps between the main terrain’s edges with the far viewing distances and blend it with sky with the help of built-in “Volumetric Horizon Fog” so the views become seamless and the world boundaries. Background terrain can be enabled/disabled or its details can be set globally from the “Settings” tab to define resolutions and rendering quality.
What is the maximum world size TerraWorld can generate? A : World size in TW is up to the user but there 2 main factors need to be considered before using the right world size.
1. The bigger the area gets, the lower the surface details get. That’s the rule of thumb for area size & details relation. So a 10×10 km terrain with 1024×1024 heightmap has 10 times surface details compared to a 100×100 km terrain with the same heightmap resolution for its area. The same applies to the satellite imagery and derived maps such as splatmaps, area masks and etc.
2. The bigger the area gets, the lower the performance may get. Because there needs to be more object placement in scene to cover the whole area so it leads to increased CPU, GPU power and creates a larger memory footprint on the ram.
What is the ordering of Scatter nodes in TerraWorld? A : Placement ordering is: Water => TerraMesh => Objects => GPU Instances
What is the source for Elevation (Heightmap) data? A : Elevation source is ESRI.
What is the source for Landcover data? A : Currently Landcover data source is OpenStreetMap.
What is the source for Satellite Imagery data? A : Satellite Imagery source is ESRI.
What is the supported Rendering Pipeline for custom shaders and graphics assets? A : TerraWorld’s graphics assets including shaders and effects are compatible with Unity’s Standard rendering pipeline and not supported in SRPs. If your project is on any SRPs rather than the Standard, the “Terrain Rendering” & “VFX” tabs in UI will be disabled.
Wind Simulation is not realistic! A : Wind Simulation is currently in Beta and will be improved in future versions. Currently shadows from vertex animations are not working.