As promised (again), here has been everything that’s been going on with my little (now not so ‘little’) test world. First and foremost, as I said I got the throwable chair fixed. The Mesh Render absolutely has to be there for the VRCChair trigger to work properly. Thankfully it can be hidden by simply clicking it off (to disable the render, but not the mesh).
There was also a problem, where the top of the chair was going through objects (and the ground). This was an easy fix (including a bug when throwing the chair, its physics break (just before it completely lands on the ground) and you see it hovering).
And finally, I added a tree pack, which adds birch, oak, and pine trees (even some rocks and flowers). These trees actually animate on their own! It’s so cool, and it doesn’t lag my game. It’s a win-win.
All there’s left for me to figure out, is A: How to do a custom house (without using many .fbx prefabs), and B: How to make a nice realistic slope that will go down to a large river.
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We attempted to tackle the second one. I couldn’t really figure it out, as you can’t flatten terrain that’s already flat with the world. But there’s actually a setting in the terrain tools to raise the entire world (not through Transform, but through the Paint Height tool). And there I got an additional lesson on the ‘Create Empty’ feature of Unity. It can be used to set up groups (and subgroups). One such use is putting all groups into one main group, which can be used set the height and relocate every object in the scene to any place I want. Quite neat (and it keeps my Hierarchy neat too).
Back to the terrain, the person was able to figure out that using either the ‘Raise / Lower Terrain’ or ‘Paint Height’ tools, one can finally dig into the ground! That’s Step 1. Step 2 is making the cliff look like a smooth as butter angle. This would prove to be quite… quite frustrating. My friend was able to pull it off, but I was on the verge of wanting to delete my world in rage. I had even downloaded and installed new brushes, in hopes I would get a more uniform look of what I’m going for.. but it was like Unity was deliberately laughing at my attempts.
At the time, I was too furious to understand what was being told to me (apart from having to expand the world). I didn’t want to do that.. not yet. I feel I haven’t learned everything, that I’m not ready for this next step!
“Why can’t Unity’s Terrain Tools be like The Sims 3’s?!” I yelled, and the person agreed with me. But eventually I thought “fuck it.. FINE! I’ll make the damn thing bigger!” and did. And then I finally realized what was being told to me (after seeing the path I made from the spawn to the house, being 10x bigger). And that’s not all, even the brushes were MUCH bigger.
As ‘unfair’ as this feels…. this is the way Unity’s poly system (and terrain tools) work. The current world’s terrain, didn’t have enough polys to make what I wanted to do, detailed enough. Enlarging it was the only way for the tools to ‘grab more’ of the polys, for more realism.