Best assets for world building

Making an environment that looks good is a time-consuming hard task without proper tools. My intention with this article is to show you a bunch of very good asset that will help you a lot to make your world in Unity.

Full disclosure: The links below are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that I have experience with all of these assets and publishers, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money on these products unless you feel you need them or that they will help you achieve your goals.

Terraforming

The first step to create an outdoor environment is set up the terrain. Although you can draw hills and mountains in Unity by hand, you are better of with a tool that does it for you. Especially if you aim a realistic environment, which requires artistic skills and also some geographic knowledge.

I show you two of the best procedural terrain generator you can find in the asset store.

Gaia combines the procedural generation and the artistic approach in a stamp-based workflow. You can use it fully procedural, manual, or in between.

1100+ positive rating, 400+ review, and the fact that Unity selected as a free Plus/Pro addon back in 2018 assure you the high quality. You really can’t go wrong buying this asset!

If you are looking for a more traditional procedural tool, map magic should be your choice. Not that widely used as the GAIA, but still has 200+ positive ratings and 100+ review. It comes with a free demo version which you can (and should) download and test if this asset works for you.

A living world needs WATER

While you can make environment without any water effect, this can really improve the look of your scene, provided that you have the right tool and shader.

This asset is a genius. It has a river spline editor and a lake tool. The water shader is just beautiful and has tons of customization option. Comes with a set of artistic content like textures, particles, for both PBR and non-PBR or artistic style.

They released a 2019 version to support Unity version 2018.3 and later.

Aquas could be an excellent alternative for water if you somehow won’t choose RAM. It’s quite a powerful asset.

Even if you have RAM this still could be useful for you.

Aiming full realism?

CTS is a PBR shader pack which enhances the looks of your terrain. Must have if you want to go full realistic.

As in case of RAM, this asset also has a 2019 release to work with the 2018.3 and later Unity versions.

Make it green!

In general, Nature Manufacture has quite nice nature packs, especially the Dynamic Nature series. I would start with the Starter pack, due to the large variety of plants and rocks. The Meadow Environment is also worth its price.

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