Erosion Confusion

[newcolours]

Hello,

This is more of a rant/feedback than a question. In any case perhaps you have a suggestion in response to improve my workflow.

The smooth tool for unity terrains is all but worthless so I relied a lot on the Gaia erosion tool air/thermal/hydraulic which used to be part of the 'paint terrain' toolset and which are really awesome by the way. I see they are now removed (or perhaps they show differently for different unity versions?).

I did thankfully spot that there are some similar options now in the stamper but I have no idea how to 'paint' with them usefully.

The problem is I never liked stampers (sorry, I know they are a PWS creation, but...) When working with terrains with a lot of height or depth (sea), the flat bottom, or flat sides (if you set the stamper scale larger) of the stamper are hard to 're-naturalize'. So now I'm facing the same issue with 'effects/smooth' of HydraulicErosion. It works 1000x better than the unity smooth, but if I'm smoothing the side of a slope it can create a block at the bottom of that slope from scaling up the height.

Hydraulic erosion is much less useful when I have  to stamp piece by piece rather than follow the curve near my coast, especially as after ever stamp unity reloads every terrain that's open. Am I using this wrong?

 

 

[Peter]

Hi, @newcolours you mention initially:
 

On 7/6/2022 at 6:13 PM, newcolours said:

Gaia erosion tool air/thermal/hydraulic which used to be part of the 'paint terrain' toolset and which are really awesome by the way. I see they are now removed (or perhaps they show differently for different unity versions?).

Note that the "Paint Terrain" toolset is not part of Gaia - that is the native unity terrain. The option to have erosion in there is part of the Unity Terrain Tools package, I'm pretty sure you had that one installed in your earlier projects. You need to install that from the package manager, then you should get the option for the "paintable erosion" back in the terrain inspector.
This is then also indeed suited better for touchups in smaller areas where you do not want the texturing / spawning to be re-generated after each stamp.