Procedural Cliff Builder

DOCUMENTATION · DISCORD

Draw cliffs, canyon walls, mesas and rock pillars directly in the Scene view: click a line on the ground and a complete cliff grows along it.

Procedural Cliff Builder by Arkerion Studios is an editor tool for level designers. The line you draw is the foot of the wall. The tool builds a wall of low-poly fractured rock blocks along it, stepped rock terraces on top, a walkable plateau or top strip, a debris slope at the foot and rocks scattered over the slope and the top. Open lines become cliff walls and canyons; closed loops become mesas with a plateau; flip one inside out and it becomes a pit. The cliff updates as you work.

Shape it the way you think about cliffs. Drag a knot to move the wall, drag the arrow above it to raise the cliff there, and set height, slope and terraces for the whole cliff, one section or a single knot. Values blend smoothly along the cliff. Five geological presets (Mesa, Canyon Wall, Eroded Badlands, Tall Climbing Wall, Small Pillar) give you a starting point in one click.

Make cliffs part of your level with holes. Add a cave mouth, an alcove, a window high in the wall or a tunnel straight through a mesa, in a Round, Square or Cave profile. Holes get rock walls, a flat walkable floor with a collider and a rough rock collar that hides the cut, and they can clear the rocks in front of the entrance. Turn the walls off and the hole becomes a socket for your own cave.

Simple mode shows the settings most people need in one block per tab; switch to Pro for every setting of the rock wall, terraces, materials, patches, strata, rocks and baking. The switch only changes the window, never your cliff.

A built-in Step Guide in the Scene view shows what to do next.

Five environment themes

• Basic: grey stylized stone with green moss and grass tops for forests and adventure maps.
• Desert: warm sandstone and sand for canyons, mesas and dry badlands.
• Ice: blue ice with snow-covered terraces for frozen cliffs and glaciers.
• Jungle: lush green over dark rock for overgrown cliffs and tropical islands.
• Lava: hot cracks glow between the rocks while open faces have cooled, with Cooling, Balanced and Molten presets.

Building tools

• Draw on terrain, meshes or a flat plane, with grid and angle snap.
• Open cliffs, closed mesas with follow-rim, level or dome plateaus, and inward-facing pits.
• Height, slope and shape per cliff, section or knot, blended smoothly.
• Fractured rock walls with adjustable block width, size variation, exposure, seams, breaks, ledges, chipping and rubble.
• Stepped rock terraces with size, height and exposure variation.
• Debris slopes with erosion, drainage channels and terrain-following Ground Fit.
• Rocks scattered naturally on slopes and tops.
• Round, Square and Cave openings, closed or through, with walls, floor, collar and Clear In Front.
• Five geological presets, validation with one-click fixes, and full Undo.

Customize the look

• Drag-and-drop Wall A, Wall B, Debris A, Debris B and Top materials, each with scale, rotation and tint.
• Round material patches with coverage, size, sharpness and top/bottom bands.
• Grass, sand, snow or ash cover on up-facing rocks.
• Strata lines with colour presets, spacing and distortion.
• Same Look For All Themes and custom Look Presets with a colour swatch.
• Object or world triplanar mapping, or a cheaper mesh-UV mode for mobile and VR.

When the cliff is finished, bake it into an ordinary prefab with LODs, colliders and rocks. The baked cliff needs no Cliff Builder code in your game. The editable cliff stays in your scene, so you can change it and bake again at any time.

Five demo scenes show the same mesa in every theme. The cliffs in them are live: the scenes stay small and the cliffs are built when a scene opens.

Full C# source code is included. New kinds of generated content can be added as part generators, and other tools can cut holes into cliffs through a small opening interface.

Perfect for

• Canyons, mesas and desert badlands
• Mountain passes and cliff-side paths
• Island coasts and plateaus
• Cave entrances and tunnels
• Frozen cliffs and glaciers
• Volcanic landscapes
• Level blockouts that become final art

Works with URP, HDRP and the Built-in Render Pipeline. Built-in requires the free Shader Graph package.

Documentation (User Guide) and a README are included in the package.