Creating Terrain From Real World Maps in Unity / Gaia Pro

There are a few methods of grabbing real world maps from Google, and putting them in your Unity game. The preferred method (of most game developers) is using Gaia Manager to manipulate your 3D map, and then importing into Unity.

There are other options to create real world maps in Unity, and the procedural generator that Gaia offers is very powerful. At the bottom of this article, you will also see a video of how to use Gaia to procedurally create a player area.

What You Need

You are going to need: –

• PhotoShop (or a free utility)
• Gaia 3D
• Unity

The first thing to do is head over to terrain.party, and select some terrain.

The minimum size I could get was 8km. I chose Colorado Springs as my location.

I then selected “Relief” from the side menu, found an area I liked, and saved the selected terrain.

What you get is a ZIP file, which contains various PNG files.

Firstly, take your Merged file, and open it with PhotoShop. You just need to save this file as a RAW file – IBM PC type.

Importing Into Unity

Head over to Unity, and locate your Gaia Manager docker.

Select “Create terrain & Show Stamper”

In Gaia Manager, go to Utilities > Show Scanner. This component allows you to use the RAW file.

Now drag &drop the RAW file you created into the scan area.

You can now reposition to your heart’s content, and save it as a stamp.

Extra Tweaking

To smooth off any jagged areas, you can select Smooth from your Stamper toolbar.

To turn this terrain into a playable environment, got to Gaia > Create Spawners, and all of the assets in the environment, as well as all the game components will be created.

Next, click Create Player, Skies Water, Wind & Screenshotter.

You can modify the first person controller and other elements also in the Extra settings.

Once you’re done tweaking, that’s it!

Enjoy your new world, created directly from a real world environment.

Here’s how to use Gaia for the uninitiated. An excellent series from Adam Goodrich.