Terrain¶

A terrain is a big grid of heights you sculpt like clay, with up to four textures painted over it. Use it for open ground like hills, beaches and valleys, where shaping brushes by hand would take forever.

This page covers making one and shaping it with the Sculpt tool (G). Texturing it is on Terrain layers and Terrain painting.

Creating a terrain¶

1. Open the dialog

   Go to Terrain > Create Terrain… in the menu bar.

   

2. Pick a size

   Resolution and Cell size decide how big it gets, and the Size row under them shows the result in units and meters. The default of 129 x 129 vertices with 64 unit cells gives 8192 units, 256 m. See Picking the cell size below.

   

3. (Optionally) Pick a starting shape

   Shape is the ground you start from. It's Hills by default, the others are Flat, Mountain, Island, Valley and Ridges. Import PNG… reads a grayscale heightmap instead, where brighter pixels are higher. Both only work here, on creation.

4. (Optionally) Pick the layers

   Base layer, Slope layer, Peak layer and Low layer are the terrain's four textures, and Use Current puts in the material you last clicked. With Paint layers from slope and height ticked they get painted right away, see Auto Paint.

5. Click Create at the bottom

   The terrain is centered on the 3D cursor, or on the Center you type in with 3D cursor unticked, and that height becomes the terrain's zero. You should see the new terrain selected, with the Sculpt tool already active.

Picking the cell size¶

257 vertices with 64 unit cells, for example, give 16384 units, 512 m.

Nothing sits between two vertices, so the cell size is the finest detail the terrain can hold. A mountain range wants big cells, a garden small ones.

Picked wrong? Select the terrain and open Resample in the Inspector. It rebuilds the grid at 65, 129, 257 or 513 vertices along the longer side and keeps the heights, paint and holes. The terrain keeps its size, so more vertices means smaller cells.

Chunk cells (32 by default) splits the terrain into square pieces for drawing and collision. Smaller chunks rebuild faster while sculpting, larger ones mean fewer nodes in Godot.

Sculpting¶

Press G, pick a mode in the tool options bar at the top left, and drag over the terrain. It works on the selected terrains, or on all of them when nothing is selected.

Keep the mouse button down and the ground keeps rising under the brush.

Ctrl+wheel resizes the brush, Shift swaps raise and lower, and holding Ctrl smooths whatever the mode.

Strength sets how fast the brush works. Raise and Lower move the center of the brush 8 units a second per point of strength, whatever the radius, so the default 4 builds 32 units a second. For hills and islands turn the strength up rather than holding for a minute.

Keep the radius above the terrain's cell size, a smaller brush only nudges the one vertex under it (the status bar tells you when that happens).

To start over, Terrain > Sculpt > Flatten, or Flatten in the Inspector, sets the whole selected terrain back to its zero height.

In Godot¶

Every terrain becomes a TrenchDotTerrain node, a StaticBody3D (Godot's node for solid ground that never moves) whose collision matches what it draws. For gameplay code, height_at(x, z) returns the ground height at a local position, handy for placing things on the ground at runtime.