there is unrest in the forest

        You know, the thing with Unity is not so much the presence or lack thereof features, it's the same issue alot of software has, and that's the lack of not just documentation, but useful, relevant documentation.  I feel like too many companies assume that it's ok to just put out basic documentation for new users and then let the community pick up the slack.  That's alright I suppose, but that doesn't mean you can slack on the basic documentation.  For instance:

function GetHeight (x : int, y : int) : float
Description
Gets the height at a certain point x,y

Really?  A function called GetHeight() that returns a height value?  No Shit?  How about some information about the input parameters?  What is the expected range of values, for instance?  How about the return value, what do the units come back as?  You know, little things, back to that whole idea of useful and relevant, right?  Sheesh.



...Captain Obvious is Obvious, Captain...
        My ire comes from a perfect case, one of today's tasks was to spawn trees on a Terrain based on the heightmap.  All the pieces are there, it's actually quite a simple process, but again, it's just not knowing the little things that results in probably a bit more experimentation than necessary.  Really I'm just whining, but i've run into so many cases of this sort of thing with so many software packages I've used (looking at you, Maya), that at some point you just wanna contract out and document the stuff yourself for them.

        So rant over, if you're interested in doing this sort of thing yourself, here's some code that might be useful:


private Terrain terr; void Start) { terr = GetComponent<Terrain>(); terr.terrainData.treeInstances = new TreeInstance[]{}; for(int j=0;j<terr.terrainData.heightmapHeight;j+=4) { for(int i=0;i<terr.terrainData.heightmapWidth;i+=2) { TreeInstance t = new TreeInstance(); if(terr.terrainData.GetHeight(i,j)>50) { t.prototypeIndex = 0; t.position = new Vector3((float)i/terr.terrainData.heightmapWidth,0,(float)j/terr.terrainData.heightmapHeight); t.color = Color.white; t.lightmapColor = Color.white; t.heightScale = 1; t.widthScale = 1; terr.AddTreeInstance(t); } } terr.Flush(); } }
        Obviously you'd want to add some sort of noise to the tree placement and maybe even add some simple tree variants so it doesn't look like a military haircut, but this code produces a good starting point, something like this:



        You could probably get even more headway by sampling other maps or attributes to add a bit more spottiness to the placement or maybe even do a radial tap per sample step, something like that. Dunno, if you make any useful changes to this, let me know! Otherwise I'm just going to do it myself and...well, i guess that's not that bad.