Hey Developers,

It has been 2671 hours since we last posted about Terrain, so we figured it was time for another one. It hasn’t just been 2671 hours since the last update, it’s been 2671 hours since we last slept. The reason we haven’t slept? We wanted to give you some awesome new Terrain features: cylinders, flatness, and a fresh new UI. Everyone can enable these new features from the File → Beta Features menu, but don’t worry we will roll these out as the default after a few weeks.

Get Flattened

No one saw it coming (we actually announced it at RDC), but we created the flatten modifier which allows you to create the flattest terrain in the world. This makes it ideal for placing houses, or roads (we don’t condone flattening houses). Behind the scenes, the flatten modifier is the grow and erode modifiers working in tandem – this ensures that the flat terrain you generate is seamless with the rest of your world. S E A M L E S S.

Flatten has 3 modes for you to enjoy:

Erode to Flat - given a desired plane of existence to flatten on, only terrain that is above this plane is removed. Grow to Flat - given a desired plane to flatten on, only terrain that is below this plane is filled in. Flatten All the Things! - given a desired plane to flatten on; a perfectly flat surface is generated. Terrain above the plane is removed and terrain below the plane is filled in.

You can select a plane to flatten along in the Workspace or set one directly from the tool.

Cylindrical Brush

One small new brush, one giant leap for brush-kind! The Cylindrical Brush makes it super easy to sculpt organic looking terrain and natural features.

New. Intuitive. Beautiful.

We have completely overhauled the terrain tools UI. There is no way you saw that coming. By adding top-level tabs we have made it easier than ever to find the tools you are looking for (but not the droid – sorry). Input fields will now provide helpful tips for correcting invalid inputs. The new framework also gives us a solid base to expand and add new functionality in the future.

Here’s your fun fact of the day: You can find the word “Input” over 500 times in the Developer Hub. We love the word input, and we hope you do too.

None of this would have been possible without the incredible work of @24RightAngles, @iriszh, @wengawenga, and @St4rst0n3! I would make a joke about how I just get paid to write DevForum posts, but that was actually @nsgriff.

Please give us your feedback and feature requests for the future of Terrain below!