[Unity Tutorial] Atlas Unity Terrain Editor - How to Structure Your Stamps

Let's take a look how we can structure our scene and improve our workflow in Atlas Unity Terrain Editor.

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00:00 Stamps as Game Objects
As your scene grows in complexity, it is important to stay on top of things and structure your stamps.

Luckily the stamps in Atlas are merely game objects that already have a hierarchy and prefab system in place.

So let's take a look at some techniques we can use to structure our scene.


This video should not be followed step by step, just lay back and watch.

00:26 Moving a Cluster of Buildings
We loaded up the demo scene included with the Atlas package, it contains a fair amount of stamps, roads and buildings.

Let's enable the preview volume and move a cluster of buildings around.
As you can see the terrain updates with it and this is due to the stamps parented inside.

This is a powerful technique that combines meshes with terrain modification.
Rocks, cliffs and lakes can also benefit from this technique.

01:03 Transforming the Base Layer
Next is our base layer.

We group the base layer that consists out of multiple stamps into another game object.

Grouping is essential to keep our hierarchy manageable and in doing so we can transform our base layer as one object.

01:22 Copy Pasting and Editing Prefabs
Next we'll take a look at these islands spread along the lake, they are copy pasted or duplicated a bunch of times.

The ability to copy paste reduces our workload immensely and combined with prefabs, we can alter one of these islands and the rest of them will update accordingly.

These are the main techniques we use for structuring our scene.

Keep in mind that the render order is still in effect, so the stamps will render from top to bottom following the hierarchy, so our game objects will most likely have to change order to get the results we need.

02:13 What's next?
In the next section, we will cover getting a sense of scale which is harder than you might think.