Polaris Highland - Low Poly Terrain Editor

Polaris Highland is a mesh based low poly terrain editor for Unity, built for stylized and performance sensitive projects. It is a native alternative terrain workflow inside Unity, not a built-in Terrain add on.

BUILT FOR

• Stylized and low poly games that need a faceted, smooth, or hybrid look.
• Mesh based pipelines, where terrain should be presented as standard mesh renderers in the scene.
• PC, Mobile, VR, and performance budgeted projects.

WHY BUILT-IN TERRAIN MAY NOT FIT

Built-in Terrain is fine for many projects, but stylized low poly is not its strength. Reduce the geometry and it still reads smooth instead of faceted. Force a sharper look with shader tricks and you start depending on rendering workarounds and narrower platform support.

Polaris renders terrain as regular meshes from the start, with faceted, smooth, and hybrid shading built into the workflow. The look is easier to direct and lands closer to what a stylized project needs.

WORKFLOW

Start broad, then refine. Stamps and splines handle the overall result. Brushes handle local shaping and cleanup. Both modes can shape geometry, texture the surface, and drive population.

1. Create multi tile terrain with the setup wizard.
2. Block out shape, textures, and population with stamps and splines.
3. Polish locally with around 20 brush types.
4. Populate with trees, grass, and props.

Live preview lets you see each change before it is committed. The terrain stays editable at runtime through a public scripting API. Watch the runtime painting demo, or play the demo build yourself.

PERFORMANCE

• Adaptive mesh density. More triangles where the terrain is detailed, fewer where it is flat, so the mesh stays light without losing shape.
• Multi threaded with Job System. Mesh generation, foliage rendering, culling, colliders, and more, in the editor and at runtime.
• GPU based editing. Most tools edit terrain data on the GPU with shaders, so painting and sculpting stay fast.
• GPU instanced vegetation. Dense trees and grass with no GameObject overhead.

START FROM WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE

Quickly convert your built-in Terrain grid to Polaris with a wizard that brings over height, holes, textures, trees, and grass. You can also import other data types like raw heightmaps, textures and meshes.

You can also export back out to built-in Terrain, mesh, raw heightmap, and texture set, so your terrain keeps working with other tools and software.

EDITIONS

This Highland is the middle edition. It adds the procedural authoring workflow, stamps, splines, conditional painting, live preview, interactive grass, and MicroSplat, on top of the core tools in Valley.

Summit adds hydraulic and thermal erosion, terrain backups, and Burst. See the feature comparison for the breakdown.

You can upgrade to Summit at any time for the price difference.

USED IN

Games using Polaris include:

• Ardenfall
• Migration
• Cannon Fotter
• Aquamariner

FAQ

• Caves or overhangs. No.
• WebGL. No.
• Requires built-in Terrain. No.
• Runtime editing. Yes.
• Mobile and VR. Yes.
• Procedural terrain with biomes. Yes. With Vista Personal.
• Large or streaming worlds. Yes. With World Streamer 2.
• Holes. Yes.
• Migrate from built-in Terrain. Yes.
• Custom shaders. Yes.
• Render pipelines. Built in RP and Universal RP.

Full platform, integration, and capability list.

COMPATIBLE TOOLS

• From Pinwheel Studio. Part of an environment tool family alongside Vista (procedural terrain), Poseidon (water), Jupiter (sky), Contour (outline), and Beam (volumetric lighting).
• Third party. Works with MicroSplat, Amplify Shader Editor, Vegetation Studio Pro, World Streamer 2, and SoulLink Spawner.

STARTER CONTENT

Ships with low poly terrain, trees, grass, and rocks from Pinwheel Studio, props from Total Game Assets, and trees from Distant Lands.

DOCS AND COMMUNITY

• User Guide and Scripting API
• YouTube Tutorials
• Website
• Contact

NOTE

Water and sky shown in screenshots are not included.