Using a Digital Elevation Model to create Terrain in Unity

Today I tried to create a section of Terrain in Unity using a Digital Elevation Model. I downloaded the DEM file from GeoGratis and converted it to a GeoTiff file using an open source application called QGIS. Once I had this GeoTiff, I was able to use this to create a mesh using the height information from the image. It turned out ok, but it is quite a dense mesh and probably is not the best way to create terrain in Unity. The built in Terrain tools in Unity are great, but I am curious to see what other ways of implementing terrain there are.

Navigation Meshes in Unity Update

I had a little bit of time this morning to try out some more stuff with the navigation meshes in Unity and was really blown away at how easy it is to work with them. As you can see in this screen shot I just took my little zombie cubes and player object and placed them on a Unity terrain that I sculpted really quickly. I baked a navigation mesh for the terrain with a click of a button and boom! As with most tasks in Unity...it just works.

Navigation Meshes in Unity

I decided to play around with navigation meshes in Unity this weekend to learn a little more about how they work. So far I'm just creating a very simple test with this little test environment, a player, a goal, some obstacles, and some zombie cubes that want to rip the polygons right off the players mesh!!! It was really simple to hook everything up and get it running. So I decided to grab the joystick controls from the Unity Standard Assets (Mobile) package and build this test for mobile. Tried it out on my Kobo Arc and it all seems to work great! I haven't done any profiling, but it seems to be running just fine. My next test will be with a mesh that is not flat. I will try out some terrain type meshes and see how Unity's navigation meshes work.

Blendcraft!

No I'm not making a Minecraft clone in Blender, however I am using this little cube in Unity to try programming some Minecraft-like features in Unity. Wish me luck.

Learning CGFX Shaders

Just as the title reads, I started to learn how to create CGFX shaders. This is one of the more difficult things I've tried learning, but all the dots are starting to connect.

This is an example of a shader that has a diffuse color, an ambient color, specularity, and fresnel. I also programmed in the ability to control the color and intensity of all of these attributes. Next steps are to start mapping textures.