Now that we have looked at the tools available to create our terrain, let's get started by setting up our terrain using the Terrain top menu. Ensure that your Terrain is still selected in the Hierarchy, and go to Terrain | Set Resolution.

As we don't want to make too large an island for our first project, set the terrain width and length both to 1000. Remember to press Enter after typing these values in so that you've effectively confirmed them before clicking on Import.

Next, our island's height needs to begin at its ground level, rather than at zero, which is the default for new terrains. If you consider that the terrain height of zero should be the sea bed, then we can say that our ground level should be raised to be the surface height of the island. Go to Terrain | Flatten Heightmap.

Click inside the Height box, and place in a value of 30 meters, and then press Enter to confirm. Click on Flatten to finish.

This change is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it difference in the Scene view, as all we've done is shift the terrain upward slightly. However, the reason we've done this is that it is a great time saver—as we can now flatten around the edges of the terrain using inverse Raise Height to leave a raised island in the centre of the terrain. This is a more time-efficient method than beginning with a flat island and raising the height in the centre.

On the Inspector for the Terrain object's Terrain (Script) component, choose the Raise Height tool—the first of the seven buttons.

Select the first brush in the palette, and set its Brush Size to 75. Set Opacity for the brush to 0.5.

Change your view in the Scene panel to a top-down view by clicking on the Y-axis (green spoke) of the view gizmo in the top-right.

Using the Shift key to lower height, paint around the outline of the terrain, creating a coastline that descends to zero height—you will know it has reached zero as the terrain will flatten out at this minimum height.

While there is no need to match the outline of the island I have created, try not to make a wildly different shape either, as you will need a flat expanse of land later. Once you have painted around the entire outline, it should look something like this:

Now switch back to a perspective (3D) view of your Scene by clicking on the center cube of the view gizmo in the top-right of the Scene window and admire your handiwork. If you are unsure, here is what mine looks like:

Now spend some time going over the island, using the Raise Height tool to create some further topographical detail, and perhaps using Lower Height (with the Shift key) to add an inlet or lake. Leave a flat area in the center of your terrain and one free corner of your map in which we are going to add a volcano!

Now to create our volcano! For this we will combine the use of the Paint Height, Raise Height, and Smooth Height tools. First, select the Paint Height tool.

Choose the first brush in the palette, and set the Brush Size to 75, Opacity to 0.5. and Height to 200. Select the Top view again using the view gizmo, and paint on a plateau in the corner that you left free on your terrain. Remember that this tool will stop affecting the terrain once it reaches the specified height of 200.

Your island should now look like this in the perspective view:

Now this plateau may look clunky—we'll rectify this with smoothing shortly, but first we need to create the volcano mouth. So now with the Paint Height tool still selected, change the Height setting to 20 and the Brush Size to 30.

Now hold down the mouse and start painting from the center of the plateau outwards towards its edge in every direction, until you have effectively hollowed out the plateau, leaving a narrow ridge around its circumference, as shown in the following screenshot:

We still have a fairly solid edge to this ridge, and when switching to the perspective view, you'll see that it still doesn't look quite right. This is where the Smooth Height tool comes in. Select the Smooth Height tool and set the Brush Size to 30 and Opacity to 1. Using this tool, paint around the edge of the ridge with your mouse, softening its height until you have created a rounded soft ridge, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now that our volcano has started to take shape, we can begin to texture the island to add realism to our terrain.

When texturing your terrain, it is crucial to remember that the first texture you add will cover the terrain entirely. With this in mind, you should ensure that the first texture you add to your texture palette is the texture which represents the majority of your terrain.

In the Standard Assets Package we included when we started the project, we are given various assets with a variety of game features to get started with. As such, you'll find a folder called Standard Assets in your Project panel. Expand this down by clicking on the gray arrow to the left of it, and then expand the subfolder called Terrain Textures.

These are the four textures we'll use to paint our island terrain, so we'll begin by adding them to our palette. Ensure that the Terrain game object is still selected in the screenshot, and then select the Paint Texture tool from the Terrain (Script) component in the Inspector.

Now that we have a fully textured island, we need to spruce up the place a little with some trees. In our Standard Assets package, there is a tree provided to get us started with the terrain editor, and thankfully for us, it is a palm tree asset.

Select the Place Trees section of the Terrain (Script) component, and click on the Edit Trees button. From the drop-down menu that appears, choose Add Tree.

The Add Tree dialog window appears. As with some of the other terrain tools, this Add dialog allows us to select from any object of an appropriate type from our Assets folder.

This is not restricted to trees provided in Standard Assets, which means that you can model your own trees by saving them into the Assets folder of your project in order to use them with this tool. However, we are going to use the Standard Assets provided palm tree. So select the Palm asset by clicking on the down arrow to the right of the Tree setting.

Bend Factor here allows our trees to sway in the wind. This effect is computationally expensive, so we'll simply use a low number. Type in a value of 2 and press Enter to confirm. If you find that this is causing low performance later in development, then you can always return to this setting and set it back to zero. Click on the Add button to finish.

With your palm tree in the palette, you should see a small preview of the tree with a blue background to show that it is selected as the tree to place.

Set the Brush Size to 15 (painting 15 trees at a time) and the Tree Density to 0 (giving us a wide spread of trees). Set Color Variation to 0.4 to give us a varied set of trees and Tree Height / Width to 1.5 with their Variation settings to 0.3.

Using single-clicks, place trees around the coast of the island, near the sandy areas that you would expect to see them. Then to complement the island's terrain, place a few more palm trees at random locations inland.

Remember that if you paint trees incorrectly at any time, you can hold the Shift key and click, or paint (drag) with the mouse to erase trees from the terrain.

Now that we have some trees on our island, we'll add a small amount of grass to complement the grass textures we covered the terrain with.

Select the Paint Details section of the Terrain (Script) component and click on the Edit Details button. Select Add Grass Texture from the pop-up menu.

The Standard Assets package provides us with a grass texture to use, so from the drop-down menu to the right of the Detail Texture setting, select the texture simply called Grass.

Having chosen the Grass texture, leave the Width and Height values at their default and ensure that Billboard is selected at the bottom of this dialog. As our grass detail textures are 2D, we can employ billboarding, a technique in game development that rotates the grass texture to face the camera during game play in order to make the grass seem less two-dimensional.

Using the color-picker boxes, ensure that the Healthy and Dry colors are of a similar shade of green to the textures we have painted onto the terrain, because leaving them on the default bright green will look out of place.

Click on the Add button at the bottom of the dialog window to confirm adding this texture to your palette.

To paint grass onto our map, we can yet again use mouse-based brushing in a similar way to the other terrain tools. Firstly, we'll need to choose a brush and settings in order to ensure a wide and disparate painting of grass detail onto our map. Given that rendering grass is another expensive feature for the computer to render, we'll keep the grass to a minimum by setting the Brush Size to 100, but Opacity to 0.05, and Target Strength to 0.6. This will give a wide spread with very little grass, and by choosing a stipple brush (see the next screenshot) we can paint on patchy areas of grass.

Now zoom into the terrain surface by selecting the Hand tool, and holding the Command key (Mac) or the Ctrl key (PC) while dragging the mouse to the right. Once at a close level of zoom, you'll be able to click the mouse to paint on areas of grass. Move around the island painting on a few grassy areas—do this sparingly for performance reasons—and later you can always come back and add more grass if the game performs well.

Now that our island terrain is ready to explore, we'll need to add lighting to our scene. When first approaching lighting in Unity, it's best to be aware of what the three different light types are used for:

An oft-overlooked area of game development is sound. For a truly immersive experience, your player needs to not only see the environment you've made, but hear it too.

Sound in Unity is handled through 2 components, the Audio Source, and the Audio Listener. Think of the Source as a speaker in your game world, and the Listener as a microphone or the player's ear. By default, camera game objects in Unity have an audio listener component. So given that you always have a camera in your game, chances are you'll only ever have to set up sound sources. It is also worth noting that the Audio Listener component has no properties to adjust—it just works—and that Unity will inform you with an error if you accidentally remove the only listener in any scene.

In creating 3D environments, the horizon or distance is represented by the addition of a skybox. A skybox is a cubemap—a series of six textures placed inside a cube and rendered seamlessly to appear as a surrounding sky and horizon. This cubemap sits around the 3D world at all times, and much like the actual horizon, it is not an object the player can ever get to.

To apply a skybox to your scene, go to Edit | Render Settings. The Inspector area of the interface will now change to show the preferences for the rendering of this scene. To the right of the Skybox Material setting, click on the drop-down arrow, and select Sunset. This will apply the skybox, but it is crucial to understand that any skybox you add will only be shown in the Game View panel by default.

As with many skyboxes, the Sunset skybox provided with Standard Assets features a drawn on Sun. The problem here is that we have our sun visually represented by the flare of the directional light, so we'll need to reposition the light to match the skybox. But first, we'll add our First Person Controller player character, so that you can see this issue first hand.

As we have constructed an island terrain, it follows that our land mass should be surrounded by water. Water in Unity is created using an animated material applied to a surface. While it is possible to create further dynamic water effects by utilizing particles, the best way to add a large expanse of water is to use one of the water materials provided by Unity.

The Standard Assets package gives us two readymade surfaces with the water material applied. Readily saved as prefabs, these objects can be introduced easily from the Project Panel. Simply open the Standard Assets | Water folder.

Drag the Daylight Simple Water prefab into the scene and position it at (500, 4, 500) by filling in the X, Y and Z values for Position in the Transform component in the Inspector. In order to expand the scale of the water prefab to form a sea around the island, simply increase both the X and Z values under Scale to 1600.

This places the water in the center of the map and four meters above the sea bed. This will cover up the corners of your island, and mask the terrain's true square-based nature. It should look like this:

In the Project panel, expand the subfolder of Standard Assets called Prefabs. In here you will find a single prefab – a readymade First Person Controller object. This can be dropped into your scene, and will allow you to walk around your terrain using the keyboard and mouse.

Drag this prefab from the Project panel onto the Scene view—remember you will not be able to accurately position this object when you initially drop it into the scene, as this should be done afterwards.

Now that your First Person Controller object is an active game object, you can see it listed in the Hierarchy and its component parts listed in the Inspector.

Reposition the First Person Controller object to (500, 35, 500) by typing the values in the Transform component in the Inspector. This position places the character directly in the centre of the map in the X and Z axes, because we have created a terrain with a width and length of 1000 meters. The Y value of 35 ensures that the player is above ground level—if it is not, then the character will fall through the map upon play. If you happen to have made a hill at this position when sculpting your terrain, simply increase the Y value to place the character above the hill at game start.

Now press the Play button to test the game, and you should be able to walk around on your island terrain!

The default controls for the character are as follows:

Walk to the top of a hill and turn until you can see the flare of the Sun. Then look to the right of the flare, and you will see that the skybox also has a lit area to represent the sun, so we need to reposition the Directional Light object to correspond to the sun in the skybox, as mentioned earlier.

Stop the game testing by pressing the Play button again. It is crucial to stop the game when you continue editing. If you leave it playing or on pause, then any edits you make to the scene will only be temporary—lasting until you press Play again or quit Unity.

Select the Directional Light object in the Hierarchy, and in the Transform component in the Inspector, reposition the object to (-500, 500, 500). This will place the light on the side of the map which the skybox's sun is on. Rotate the object by 120 in the Y axis (center box) and your Directional light's position will now match the light in the skybox.

Finally, as we have added the First Person Controller object, we no longer need the object that our scene came with by default—Main Camera. Unity reminds us of this by showing an info message in the console preview area at the bottom of the screen:

To rectify this, simply remove the Main Camera object, as we no longer need it. To do this, select it in the Hierarchy, and on Mac, press Command+Backspace, on PC use Shift+Delete, or on either platform, go to Edit | Delete.

Now that this object is gone, your island terrain is complete. Save your scene so that you do not lose any work—go to File | Save Scene and name your scene Island Level—Unity will assume you want to save in the Assets folder of your project, and will choose that folder as the save location automatically because all assets must be in this folder. To keep things neat, you can make a Levels subfolder now and save in there if you like.

Congratulations, your island terrain is ready for exploration, so hit the Play button again and have a wander! Just remember to press Play again when you are finished.

In the Meshes section of FBX Importer, you can specify:

The Materials section allows you to choose how to interpret the materials created in your third-party 3D modelling application. The user can choose either Per Texture (creates a Unity material for each texture image file found) or Per Material (creates Materials only for existing materials in the original file) from the Generation drop-down menu.

The Animations section of the Importer allows you to interpret the animations created in your modelling application in a number of ways. From the Generation drop-down menu, you can choose the following methods:

The Animations section then features three further checkboxes: