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  • Photo du rédacteurThomas Deliot

Terrain engine introduction

Since 2015 I have been working on a terrain engine project for Unity on which I spend most of my free time. It started as a subject we suggested for a six-months school project we had to do with two other friends, with me taking on its development after the school project ended. This project aims to create a real-time terrain engine capable of generating realistically scaled and detailed terrains on the fly, mimicking real-life sceneries, for interactive uses like simulators and video games. The featured screenshots show the terrain engine working on a 155 by 155km area of the Alps around the Mt Blanc, using a 1arc-second DEM heightmap (~30m precision). The video shows the results of a recent school project during which I've worked on adding volumetric clouds to this engine (and in general volumetric lighting and phenomena).

Current Features :

  • 1:1 scale terrains using large heightmaps of Earth areas and procedural terrain detailing.

  • Fast terrain generation running on the GPU.

  • Centimeter-level terrain resolution and pixel-wide details in the distance.

  • A new method for rendering billboard vegetation using raycasting, not limited in complexity by distance or density.

  • Procedural material and vegetation placement mimicking natural processes and integration with SpeedTree objects.

  • Physics support.

  • (In development) Realistically scaled volumetric cloud coverage, athmosphere simulation and and weather system.

  • (In development) Terrain editing, roads, dirt paths, river beds.






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