For this class, we learnt to properly use Unity's Terrain Tool to its full potential. We used terrain.party to grab height maps from real world locations to create geographically plausible areas in the Terrain tool. Terrain.party was originally used in Cities: Skyline to create topology for cities to be built on. To actually import it into Unity for use, we had to turn it from a PNG to RAW in Photoshop so Unity could actually use it as a height map. I personally found it quite convoluted as PNG is a more popular format in my experience but I am sure there was a technical reasoning.

For this exercise, I sourced the area from the Rio Rico area in Arizona, USA. It had a nice valley path area with two mountainous regions flanking it. The height map was exported out as quite jaggedy so I used Unity's Terrain tool to smooth out the pointy parts into smooth mountains.

To clean it up, I brought in a customized sand texture from Textures.com to turn the area into sand, then brought in desert assets from the Store's Desert Kits 64 to populate the area with props to recreate a blockout of an Egyptian civilisation along the Nile, buried by sand. For the final touch, I used the flanking path to create a river through the in-built Water Tool.