Vertex 3D Terrain: Planet, Floating Island & Spline Creator

Vertex 3D Terrain is a terrain creation, sculpting & biome painting tool for Unity. Build fully 3D landscapes with caves, overhangs, floating islands & small planetary worlds, then add roads, grass, vegetation & surface effects in one editor workflow.

Sculpt cliffs you can walk beneath, dig tunnels through mountains & paint environments that change during gameplay, all beyond the limits of a traditional heightmap.

KEY FEATURES

• Terrain Sculpting & Smoothing: Sculpt, smooth, flatten & grab 3D mesh terrain to shape landscapes, cliffs & overhangs.
• Caves & Underground Tunnels: Dig cave systems, chambers, entrances & tunnel networks by hand or with spline paths.
• Planet & Floating Island Creation: Generate sculptable planetoids, small spherical worlds & floating islands with editable undersides.
• Biome Painting & Terrain Blending: Paint & blend terrain biomes with brushes, gradients, height, slope, noise & dusting.
• Grass, Vegetation & Rock Scatter: Populate painted biomes with 12 scatter presets or your own custom meshes.
• Scatter Wind, LODs & GPU Instancing: Add animated vegetation with visibility culling & levels of detail for larger populations.
• Dynamic Biomes & Seasonal Changes: Build up snow, reveal dry riverbeds & change vegetation coverage or colour during gameplay.
• Roads, Paths & Bridges: Draw editable splines for roads, trails, bridges, stairs, trenches, riverbeds & tunnels.
• Adaptive Mesh Detail: Automatically add geometry where sculpting needs it without increasing detail across the entire terrain.
• Face Selection & Mesh Editing: Subdivide, extrude, flatten, create boulders, pillars & arches, delete faces & repair holes.
• Paint & Sculpt Masks: Restrict terrain editing to selected areas while protecting surrounding surfaces.
• Textured & Vertex Color Terrain: Choose texture based materials or textureless terrain for stylized environments.
• 200+ Biome Support: Build large terrain material libraries with shared textures for memory efficient biome variations.
• Water Flow & Lava Effects: Animate flowing biome surfaces & pulsing emission for rivers, lava & magical ground.
• Surface Detail & Anti Tiling: Add perceived surface depth & reduce visible texture repetition across landscapes.
• Terrain Tiles, LODs & Optimization: Edit connected tiles, generate terrain LODs & simplify unnecessary mesh geometry.
• Runtime Surface Detection: Use raycast biome data for footsteps, particles, decals & gameplay reactions.
• Editor Controls & Languages: Undo / Redo, stylus pressure, customisable shortcuts & English, Japanese or Korean interfaces.

TERRAIN SCULPTING, SMOOTHING & SHAPING

Vertex 3D Terrain edits real 3D meshes, so your landscape can form vertical cliffs, overhangs, rock faces, arches & cavities. Sculpt and smooth terrain directly in the Scene View, flatten areas for level design, or use the Grab Tool to pull out rock horns, hanging formations & distinctive silhouettes.

Automatic mesh detail adds extra geometry where sculpting stretches the surface, helping curved & heavily sculpted areas retain detail.

Smoothing keeps matching & split vertices together to help prevent cracks across hard edges, caves, overhangs & neighbouring terrain tiles.

Biome painting stays attached while you reshape the mesh, so you can keep refining your landscape without repainting the whole area.

CAVES, CHAMBERS & UNDERGROUND TUNNELS

Create cave systems, tunnel networks, chambers, entrances & exits using terrain brushes or editable spline routes.

Tunnels can break through the surface to form real openings in the terrain mesh. Continue sculpting, smoothing & painting these entrances as part of the surrounding landscape.

An optional cave worklight helps you see while editing dark enclosed spaces.

PLANETS, PLANETOIDS & FLOATING ISLANDS

Generate small spherical worlds for miniature planets, asteroid environments & exploration levels. Sculpt & paint each planetoid using the same tools as standard terrain.

Create floating islands with configurable tops & undersides. Build flat plateaus, rocky formations, pointed fantasy islands, stepped shapes or rounded landmasses, then refine their shape directly in the Scene View.

FACE SELECTION, MESH EDITING & MASKS

Grow or shrink selections, flatten surfaces, paint biome data, subdivide faces, extrude terrain, generate pillars, boulders & arches, delete faces or fill open holes.

Save selected faces as an editing mask to limit paint & sculpt brushes to a chosen area. Refine part of your terrain while protecting surrounding surfaces, then pause or clear the mask when you want unrestricted editing again.

BIOME PAINTING, TERRAIN PAINTING & BLENDING

Paint & blend grass, dirt, rock, sand, snow, water, lava & your own custom terrain biomes.

Use brush painting & an eyedropper for direct control. Draw interactive gradients, distribute surfaces by height & slope, or add noise & procedural breakup to make transitions less uniform.

Painted biome coverage also drives the grass, vegetation & rocks scattered above it.

GRASS, VEGETATION & PROCEDURAL SCATTER

Populate environments with grass, flowers, rocks, mushrooms & your own custom meshes.

Choose from 12 built in scatter presets or configure custom mesh variants. Control target biomes, density, slope, scale, offset & alignment to place details where they suit the terrain. Weighted variants help you mix different meshes within the same scatter setup.

Built in presets support colour variation, shading, metallic, smoothness, emission & animated wind. Custom mesh wind requires a compatible shader, with instructions included for setting it up in Shader Graph.

GPU instancing, visibility culling & LODs help manage larger scatter populations.

Scatter can respond to live biome changes, allowing vegetation to thin, disappear or change colour as snow, seasons or corruption spread across the terrain.

DYNAMIC BIOMES, SNOW & SEASONAL CHANGES

Change terrain appearance during gameplay by adjusting biome strengths.

Fade water coverage to reveal the sand beneath a river, build snow over grass & rock, or spread corruption across an environment. Use live biome changes for drying riverbeds, wetness, flooding, seasonal transitions & damaged ground.

The Dusting Brush marks where one biome is allowed to replace another. Prepare selected parts of grass, rock or soil for snow, then increase coverage from none to complete replacement.

Runtime biome changes control surface appearance & coverage. Terrain sculpting & mesh editing take place in the Unity Editor.

WATER FLOW, LAVA & EMISSION EFFECTS

Animate biome surfaces for running water, lava, streams, magical ground & stylized moving grass.

Control biome flow that moves continuously or travels back & forth. Add pulsing emission for glowing lava, energy surfaces & animated material effects.

ROADS, PATHS, BRIDGES & SPLINES

Draw smooth, editable spline paths across terrain & other mesh surfaces.

Create roads, trails, bridges, stairs, trenches, riverbeds & underground tunnels. Shape, flatten, paint & blend the terrain along a path, with control over width, height, rotation & falloff.

Select faces for precise placement or allow them to be created automatically.

TERRAIN TEXTURES, MATERIALS & BIOME LIBRARIES

Build textured terrain with libraries of 200+ biomes.

Terrain Atlas supports colour, normal, metallic, smoothness, ambient occlusion, emission & height information. Create related biome variations by reusing texture data while changing colour & surface settings.

Build material variations without duplicating a full texture set for each biome.

Surface detail adds perceived depth without increasing terrain geometry. Anti tiling helps break up visible texture repetition across large landscapes while preserving close surface detail.

VERTEX COLOR & TEXTURELESS TERRAIN

Store terrain appearance directly in the mesh. Drive colour, metallic, smoothness, ambient occlusion & emission without surface textures for stylized environments, with separate biome libraries for textured & textureless workflows.

CONNECTED TERRAIN TILES & LARGE LANDSCAPES

Build larger environments from multiple terrain tiles & edit across them as one continuous landscape.

Neighbouring terrain pieces keep shared borders aligned during sculpting, shading & biome painting.

TERRAIN LODS, MESH SIMPLIFICATION & OPTIMIZATION

Generate terrain chunks & automatic LOD groups for distance rendering.

Create lower detail terrain meshes while preserving important border geometry so neighbouring pieces remain connected. Simplify flat areas & remove unnecessary geometry while retaining important terrain shapes & biome boundaries.

RUNTIME SURFACE DATA & RAYCAST DETECTION

Bake biome information into lightweight runtime data, then detect the surface beneath a raycast to choose footstep sounds, spawn dust or snow particles, place decals & trigger environmental reactions.

Surface detection works without keeping the terrain mesh readable by the CPU. An included runtime demo demonstrates biome detection with flow settings & biome replacement.

UNITY EDITOR WORKFLOW & LANGUAGE OPTIONS

Create, sculpt, paint & refine terrain with native Unity Undo / Redo, graphics tablet & stylus pressure support, Scene View brush controls & customisable keyboard shortcuts.

Choose English, Japanese or Korean editor interfaces. Save terrain to prefabs & create standalone material copies when an environment needs its own settings.

Documentation Can Be Found Here