#03 - Basic Terrain Settings

In this tutorial, I'll show you the terrain layer where you can configure settings such as the terrain size, level of detail, and other useful parameters related to the initial terrain that World Creator automatically generates when you start. Of course, it's also possible to create a terrain completely from scratch or to import an existing terrain in the form of a height map or a mesh and continue working on it. I will explain exactly how that works in a later video. If you're wondering why my terrain looks much more impressive than yours, which might look something like this, just by comparison, that's because I've added a few filters specifically for this video to make the visuals look more punchy and appealing for the viewer. Don't worry though, I'll explain how to achieve this look in the next tutorial. Okay, now let's take a closer look at the terrain layer. The first setting is the seed. Using the plus and minus buttons, you can randomly generate new terrain shapes. With the randomize button, you generate a new random seed value, resulting in a new terrain. The save button allows you to store the currently selected seed. Using the database button, you can access all previously saved seed values. Sometimes you randomly generate a terrain shape that looks really great. And in those cases, it can be very useful to save the seed and reuse it later if needed. With the 1K, 2K, 4K, and similar buttons, you can quickly set the terrain size to common resolutions that are typically preferred by game engines. Alternatively, you can manually define your own terrain size by entering custom values for width and length. The precision setting allows you to control the level of detail of the terrain. This value is combined with the terrain size and can result in higher height map resolutions. By default, the precision is set to 1 meter, which is more than sufficient for most game development use cases. For this tutorial, we'll ignore the settings noise world scale, scale textures with world, and scale objects with world. These settings will become important later on when we start creating more complex biomes and landscapes, but we'll cover that in detail in a future video. The seed value for the base noise adds an additional layer of noise on top of the terrain. This slightly modifies the surface while still preserving the overall structure of the terrain. Using general strength, you can increase or decrease intensity of this added noise, resulting in either very smooth terrains or much more ruck and rocky landscapes.