Unity Summer of Code Post Mortem: Terrain Toolkit

Interesting article, thanks for sharing. How many hours total do you think this took you? A demo executable would be very interesting. I always find attempts at erosion interesting.

Some details on the erosion techniques would be nice (although I appreciate this isn't what the article is about)

When is this toolkit coming out? I notice it's not listed on the Unity extension page like the Detonator project.

Thanks for the feedback. As this was part of the Unity Summer of Code, I worked on this over a 6 week period. Not sure about the exact number of hours - probably 150-200 including some preliminary work that I did on it?

The techniques used are all based around cellular automata - at each iteration, each cell in the heightmap and it's neighbours are evaluated based on their height, slope as well as the amount of water, sediment, etc. at that point - depending on the type of erosion used. In this way, a certain amount of material is distributed from each cell to its neighbours at each iteration. The algorithms are quite optimised for speed in the initial version, but in the future I plan to add more complex erosion algorithms based on the Navier-Stokes equations.

I'm hoping that the release is not too far away now. The hold up is a bit unfortunate, as I'd hoped it would be much earlier. I think it's just that there's been so much Unity stuff going on recently - especially with Unite '09 and the 2.6 release. In addition, there are now a couple of Unity 2.6 related bugs that are kinda showstoppers - so I'm thinking that the release will probably end up roughly coinciding with the 2.6.1 update.

However, the additional time has meant that there have been a few improvements made, such as the addition of presets to some of the filters which make it a lot more accessible for less technical users. I've also started some experiments into real-time destructible terrain, though that will probably be released later.

I'll be sure to post here once it's out.

For me, for a terrain engine to be utterly excellent, it needs to have support for vector based roads. Not just texture painting revealing a tiling texture, but actually having a road texture follow a vector path.

Here are some examples:
Houdini (spectacular) -
Crysis -
Leadwerks -

The Terrain Toolkit has now been released on the Unity site!

Here's a few handy links:

Download the Terrain Toolkit here: http://unity3d.com/support/resources/unity-extensions/terrain-toolkit

Read about the release here: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/02/23/summer-of-code-terrain-toolkit-released

Check out the API demo with downloadable source code here: http://www.sixtimesnothing.com/terraintoolkit/APIExample.html

Online documentation can be found here: http://www.sixtimesnothing.com/terraintoolkit/

Any comments or questions? Contact be here through my blog or discuss the toolkit on the Unity Forums: http://forum.unity3d.com