Anvil CSG terrain got remastered

Anvil has been able to make terrain for a long time. Honestly though, it was pretty weak. So it got a remaster.

The new terrain is a proper part of the editor. You sculpt it, paint it, cover it in trees, and Build Map turns it into part of the same map as your brushes, with the same lighting and collision.

What you can do with it

• Sculpt with Raise, Smooth and Flatten brushes, or grab single vertices, edges and faces like you would on a brush.
• Import a heightmap over one terrain or several at once.
• Sew, merge and split terrains to cover bigger areas.
• Paint up to 8 materials, by hand or with Auto Paint rules (grass on flat ground, rock on steep slopes, that kind of thing).
• Scatter trees, rocks and grass, by hand or with Auto Scatter rules. Up to 16 scatter layers per terrain.
• Pick the shading: Simple Diffuse for the retro look, or PBR.

It isn't a Unity Terrain object. It's Anvil's own mesh terrain, made for level design, so it builds into the same map as everything else.

Fast, even with a whole forest on it

A terrain full of trees can get heavy quick. So when you build, Anvil cuts it into pieces, and the game only draws the pieces the camera can actually see:

This is Unity's own culling view in the Scene window. Watch the camera on the right: as it turns, every piece outside its view disappears, and comes back as soon as the camera looks at it again. Unity does the skipping, Anvil just cuts the terrain up so there's something to skip. One giant mesh would always be drawn whole.

Here's what Build Map does with a terrain:

• Cuts it into pieces. Terrains of 32 x 32 cells or more are cut into pieces of about 64 x 64 cells, so the parts behind you can be skipped.
• Gives each piece four levels of detail. Full, half, quarter and eighth. Pieces far away use the simple ones. From a player's height that's about half the triangles, and far fewer from the air.
• Draws grass and small stuff with GPU instancing. Put a scatter layer in Instanced mode and it's drawn in 32 m cells, using the prefab's own LOD levels. Cells farther than the layer's Draw Distance (250 m by default) aren't drawn at all.
• Keeps the lighting seamless. Each terrain gets one lightmap area, and all the pieces share it, so there are no seams between them.

Terrain LOD is on by default. If you want, you can change how much detail it's allowed to drop (Max Error), for the whole map or per terrain.

Where to read more

The terrain docs cover every tool and setting.

The new terrain is part of the newer version of Anvil, which is coming to the Unity Asset Store for $20 ($14 for the first two weeks). New to Anvil? Start here.

Got questions, or made something with it? Show me on the Discord.