3D Pixel-Art Terrain Authoring

Date of Recording: 2021-02-21

The tile-based aesthetic of pixel art games is difficult to capture using Unity's default terrain engine, which linearly interpolates a heightmap texture over a variably-subdivided quad. Instead, we opt to build a custom terrain mesh generator that treats the input heightmap as a low-resolution tile map, and translates it into a mesh using a marching-squares-based algorithm designed to generate pixel-art-like structures including terraces and slopes.

A custom editor UI is made to author edits to the heightmap in a way which is intuitively clear. This system lends itself to both procedural heightmap generation and artist manipulation.