Essential Unity Tools for Environments

Today’s Friday list is gathered for anyone looking for ready solutions to considerably ease and accelerate the environment production. Take a look at a few amazing terrain, foliage, sky and texture tools for Unity!

TENKOKU Dynamic Sky

With Tenkoku Unity users will get a highly accurate dynamic sky and weather rendering with the complete 24-hour day-night-year cycle, adjustable lighting, cloud formations, and different weather effects. The asset has many customizable features which open you the door to endless experiments and mesmerizing results. It does influence the performance, however, the developer is constantly bringing new updates with fixes, and the customers leave very enthusiastic and positive reviews. What’s more, the system is now rewritten in C#.

Among other features there are:

• True equinox & precession positioning
• Latitude and longitude adjustment
• Accurate sun, planet, and star positions
• Accurate lunar movement and phases
• Volumetric lit atmosphere effects
• Ambient sound effects
• Lightning, thunder, and rainbow effects
• Partial, annular, and total solar eclipse
• and more

Gaia

Gaia is an impressively quick tool that allows you to produce mobile, VR, and desktop environments within a short period of time. With it, you can generate fully procedural terrains, craft them manually or combine both approaches to make new scenes the way you like. The tool comes with sample assets (village exteriors kit, rocks, grass, textures, trees and more) that will considerably reduce the setup time if you need to deal with it quickly.

Gaia will allow you to:

• Enhance your terrain by terracing, eroding, mixing and blending
• Texture, plant, and populate your terrain procedurally using spawners
• Export meshes, normal maps, curvature and more via the utility system
• Set up default lighting, pre-configured sky, and camera FX
• Use it with the previous asset Tenkoku as they are compatible
• and more

Landscape Auto Material

Another versatile tool for terrains Landscape Auto Material which lets users automatically texture landscapes based on height, slopes and other parameters as well as paint foliage with Multi Foliage Brush Tool combining different foliage types simultaneously. Please note, however, that at the moment this asset is not suitable for the Unity 2018 users, only Unity 2017 and earlier.

LAM comes with the following features:

• • custom physical-based terrain shaders
  • triplanar texturing support, eliminating “stretching” on slopes
  • multi-UV mixing to reduce repetitive tiles in the distance
  • additional coloring map to reduce repetitiveness
  • custom tree shaders with wind animation and leaf translucency (transmission), working with both built-in and prefab-based trees
  • custom grass shader with translucency and texture-based wind animation with an improved realistic specular wave
  • custom foliage system is compatible with any shaders outside the package

• and more

Vegetation Studio Pro

The third and the final terrain tool in our list – Vegetation Studio Pro. VSP gives Unity users the ability to spawn and render vegetation based on a customizable set of rules. Create reusable vegetation packages with any trees and plants you want, set placements rules, add custom biomes and use a custom render system to produce extensive maps. 

VSP has:

• support both Unity terrains and mesh terrains
• API for 3rd party tools and shaders
• Run-time masking system
• Instanced rendering
• Rule-based splat map generation
• Collider system
• VR-Support
• and more 

Texture Creator

Texture Creator is a nice and cheap asset to wrap up the toolset for quick environment production. With it, you can easily create materials from pictures of any size right inside Unity. Create seamless diffuse, normal, height, specular and occlusion maps, and TC will assign all the maps automatically to speed up your work. This is a great option for those who are looking for a tool to produce simple materials on the fly.