Today we learned about noise terrains, which are a way of creating a landscape by using an algorithm with a mathematical pattern. This pattern will look unpredictable, but it follows a few set rules that make it more realistic.
We had a go at doing this today, using multiple programs, such as Unity and Photoshop. The first thing we did was open Unity and then went straight into Photoshop, where we created a new image which was 2048x2048 pixels, with a resolution of 72.
After that, we went onto the Filter option, then to Render - Clouds. This will generate a pattern that resembles clouds, using an algorithm. Each time you do this, the result will be different, as the chances of getting the same design as almost impossible (because of the pixel count).
Once that was done, we made sure the image was set to 16-bits, and grayscale, before saving it as a RAW file. It was then imported into Unity.
Once it was imported, the terrain used the darker and lighter areas to level itself. It starts out looking like spikes, before it has not yet been adjusted. I adjusted it by going down to the bottom of the terrain settings and changing the 'Terrain Height' from 600 to 100.
This improved the noise terrain immensely, and it started to look more like a realistic mountain range. I played around with some more heights and pixel counts, and found that 50 Terrain Height makes the terrain look gentle but still like it would be a challenge to scale in a video game.
Overall, this was a great session, where I actually used Unity successfully. The thought of using Unity often worried me, because coding is definitely not my strong point. However, this has shown me that it is more straightforward than I thought.