Terrain & Sculpting
Add ground and shape it two ways: procedurally, by dialling in hills from a handful of numbers, and by hand, with a brush that raises, lowers, smooths and flattens. Every edit replicates to your peers.
Adding terrain
Right-click the viewport ▸ Add ▸ Ground ▸ Terrain (or the Add menu, Shift+A). This drops a flat 24 m × 24 m plane at the point you click, subdivided into a 48×48 grid and tinted a soft sage green.
The 48-segment resolution is deliberate: it's the densest grid that still fits the limit for streaming edited geometry, so a fully sculpted terrain always replicates cleanly. For bigger worlds, tile several terrains rather than asking for one huge one — see Bigger worlds below.
Terrain is a normal scene object: it selects, transforms and replicates like anything else.
Procedural hills
A fresh terrain starts flat, and its shape is parametric — select it and open Properties ▸ Geometry:
| Row | What it does |
|---|---|
| Size | The tile's extent in metres (1–200) |
| Segments | Grid resolution per side (2–48) |
| Seed | Which landscape you get. Same seed, same hills, on every peer and in every session |
| Height | How tall the hills are. 0 is flat — the starting state |
| Detail | Feature size: low is broad rolling ground, high is tight and noisy |
| Octaves | Layers of detail (1–6). More octaves add finer texture without changing the height |
| Ridged | Turns smooth hills into creased ridges — mountainous rather than rolling |
| Warp | Bends the pattern so features stop looking regular |
| Edges | flat (uniform), island (high in the middle, falling to the rim) or bowl (low in the middle, rising at the rim) |
| Tile X / Tile Z | Which part of the landscape this tile shows — see below |
Set Height above zero and hills appear. Every row is live: scrub Seed to shop for a landscape, then raise Octaves for detail.
Why the numbers, not the mesh
Only these ~11 numbers travel to your peers, and only they are stored in a saved scene — everyone rebuilds the same hills from the same values. It also means a terrain stays fully re-shapeable: change the seed a month later and the landscape re-rolls.
Bigger worlds
Use several tiles with the same Seed and different Tile X / Tile Z, offset by exactly one Size each. All tiles then sample one continuous landscape, so their edges meet seamlessly.
Use those two rows — never a move — to choose which part of the landscape a tile shows. Dragging a tile with the gizmo slides its mesh but not the landscape it was cut from, so the join stops matching.
Four tiles of a 24 m world:
| Tile | Tile X | Tile Z |
|---|---|---|
| north-west | 0 | 0 |
| north-east | 24 | 0 |
| south-west | 0 | 24 |
| south-east | 24 | 24 |
(Place each tile in the scene as usual — the offsets only decide which slice of the landscape it draws.)
Edges: making a ring of mountains
Edges ▸ bowl raises each tile toward its rim, so a grid of bowl tiles gives a basin ringed by high ground — the classic arena. island does the opposite for a single tile meant to sit in water or void.
Sculpting by hand
Right-click the terrain ▸ Sculpt terrain. This selects the object (which locks it so peers can't edit it at the same time) and opens the Sculpt toolbar — a floating tool palette you can drag anywhere.
Drag on the terrain surface to sculpt. A ring cursor follows your pointer, hugging the surface, to show the brush footprint.
The Sculpt toolbar
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| ⛰ Raise | Pushes the surface up under the brush. |
| ⛏ Lower | Pushes it down. |
| 〰 Smooth | Relaxes bumps toward the local average — softens what you've made. |
| ▭ Flatten | Pulls the surface toward the height where you first touched down. |
| Radius | Brush size, 0.5 – 8 m (default 3). |
| Strength | How fast the brush moves the surface, 0.05 – 1 (default 0.5). |
| Done ✕ | Leaves sculpt mode (Esc also exits). |
Each brush stroke — from pressing down to lifting the pointer — is one undo step (Ctrl+Z). While you drag, peers see a live preview several times a second; when you release, the final shape is committed and synced.
Sculpting any mesh
The same brush works on any mesh, not just terrain: right-click an object ▸ Sculpt mesh. The difference is which way the brush pushes — on terrain it moves the surface straight up and down, on a mesh it moves along the surface's own normals, so you can bulge and dent a shape from any angle. Flatten pulls toward the plane you first touched and Smooth relaxes the surface toward its local average, exactly as on terrain.
Under the hood
Sculpting only moves the surface up and down, never sideways, so the grid stays watertight and normals are re-smoothed after every edit — no faceted seams. The result travels to peers as a geometry snapshot on the same channel used by mesh editing.
Hand edits lock the parametric rows
The moment you sculpt a terrain — or carve a road into it, or edit it in mesh mode — the Geometry rows lock, and the panel says so.
That's deliberate. Those rows rebuild the terrain from its numbers, which would throw the hand work away, and nudging a seed by accident should not cost you an afternoon of sculpting.
When you do want the parametric shape back, press Regenerate (discards the sculpt) and confirm. The rows return and the ground goes back to what the numbers say.
Regenerate really does discard it
The sculpted shape is still in your undo history, but it takes more than one Ctrl+Z to walk back to it. Treat Regenerate as deliberate.
Roads, paths and rivers
To fit a spline and a terrain together, use Flatten on the spline's right-click menu: Terrain to this spline cuts a level bed for it, and This spline onto a surface drops the spline onto the ground instead. Both are one undo step, and both ask you to click the other object.
Sculpting vs. mesh editing
Sculpting is its own mode, separate from the vertex/edge/face mesh edit mode (Tab):
- Sculpt is brush-based and reached from the Sculpt terrain / Sculpt mesh menu entry — for organic shaping, where you don't care which vertex is which.
- Mesh edit is precise: it selects and moves individual vertices, edges and faces, and it's where extrude, bevel, knife and the loop tools live.
They never overlap — entering one doesn't affect the other. Sculpting never changes the number of vertices, so shape a mesh first and sculpt it after.
Desktop only
Terrain sculpting is a desktop feature. It isn't available in VR yet.