Export to Unity

Follow this workflow guide to take your terrain and texture splatmaps into the Unity engine.

Terrain into Unity

Within World Machine

1. Place a Height Output device into your world. Wire the terrain you wish to export into the device’s input.
2. Choose your export format within the File Output device. You should use the RAW16 format.
3. Build your world and export all files. The “Export Terrain files…” option from the File Menu provides a central location to do both.

Import into Unity

Luckily, Unity makes it easy to import a terrain. Simply follow these steps:

1. From the Terrain menu, choose “Create a Terrain”
2. Again from the Terrain menu, choose “Import Heightfield”
3. By default Unity considers both 8 and 16bit RAWs to use only the .raw extension, whereas World Machine uses .r16. Change the import filter to “All Files” and navigate to where you saved your exported World Machine .r16 file. Select it.
4. In the Import dialog, make sure the depth is Bit16 and the byte order is changed to Windows, then hit Import

You should now have your Terrain inside Unity! You will probably have to play with the Terrain Scale to get the size to fit correctly into your scene.

One Warning: Unity interprets raw heightfield origins differently from World Machine; your terrain will appear to be flipped on the Y axis! One way to fix this is to add a Flipper device in World Machine just before your Height Output and turn on the Y-axis flip. This will make the terrain export identically.

---

Texture export to Unity

Unity has built-in support for texture weight-maps (called “splat” maps). You can create multiple layers of terrain textures and paint each one onto the terrain.

This simple workflow provides a way to import the texture splatmaps created within World Machine into Unity. Please note that although this method works for basic Unity Terrains, advanced users may require their own techniques.

Within World Machine

1. Create your terrain texturing masks based upon whatever criteria you want (for example, using Height Selectors, Slope Selectors, Erosion masks, etc).
2. Use the Splat Converter device to control your splatmaps and enforce proper weighting (sum-to-one, etc). For more details and an example world using the Splat Converter, see the “Splatmap Converter.tmd” example file included in the World Machine Examples under “New Examples for WM 2.3\Techniques”
3. To convert your individual maps into a bitmap, wire them into a Channel Converter, which will produce an RGB image for the first three channels. The fourth will be used as the Alpha channel of the bitmap. Wire the resulting maps into one or more bitmap output devices to create a 4 channel splatmap. If you are using more than 4 textures, simply create multiple bitmap outputs and adjust the Splat Converter accordingly.
4. Build the world and export your terrain and splatmap.

Within Unity

There is one prerequisite you’ll need to easily import a splatmap from World Machine. Below is a simple Unity script that helps you import and replace splatmaps. Download it and extract to your Project folder, making sure that the script ends up inside the YourProject/Assets/Editor folder.

Download Unity Splatmap Replacer script

All Done!