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Hey everyone, first of all thanks for checking out this post.

I am interested in using Unity to recreate an historic lumber community that existed in the early 1900's in Ontario Canada. That being said I need lots of advice and guidance and am interested in anyone who wants to help out with this project.

I think using this program would be a great way of bringing these long ghost town communities back to life.

You can use Unity to do whatever you want. You will just have to use a 3D modeling software, which I recommend Blender if you don't have one since its FREE. You can then use the FPS controller which comes with Unity so you can walk through the town and experience it in First person. Using a simple skybox which comes with Unity also you can have a fast setup in no time, just have to build the buildings.

Thanks a ton, I just wish I could import the terrain from Google Earth or such programs to ease the terrain construction as I want it to be accurate.

That being said I really thank you for everything.

These are fun projects that you can get the government involved in too.

Using google earth to get the terrain is already one nice thing you can do, but depending on the community (if it still exists) you can go to them and get all kinds of old pictures. If it had perm. structures then there should also be a government office that has the blueprints for buildings that were built during it.

I think most cities / towns retain alot of historical documents and stuff, those people love when people try and do something relating to history for free.

Noctrine wrote:These are fun projects that you can get the government involved in too.

Using google earth to get the terrain is already one nice thing you can do, but depending on the community (if it still exists) you can go to them and get all kinds of old pictures. If it had perm. structures then there should also be a government office that has the blueprints for buildings that were built during it.

I think most cities / towns retain alot of historical documents and stuff, those people love when people try and do something relating to history for free.

And if the area is still populated, you may be able to get on the local news as well.

How can one use Google Earth for terrain?

Chyren wrote:How can one use Google Earth for terrain?

I'm not sure if you actually could. Google Earth is just satellite images all strung together, so they are actually completely flat as far as a computer program knows. What you want would be "relief maps" of the area you are wanting to model. I think some modelling programs can actually import relief maps and generate terrain with them by turning them into height maps.

Here is a tutorial on it:

http://learnunity3d.com/tutorials/googl ... y-tutorial

He actually posted asking about this in two different threads. The other one is here. I actually didn't know you could turn Google Earth images into 3D terrain files!

Jackolantern wrote:He actually posted asking about this in two different threads. The other one is here. I actually didn't know you could turn Google Earth images into 3D terrain files!

Yeah, I saw the second post after I replied to this one...oh well.


I didn't know you could either until I was doing a search trying to find tutorials on how to make good terrain. Something like what you would see in Fable...and I saw the Google Earth thing and was shocked!