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...