Environment
Environment
Terrain
When creating a new level in Lumberyard, a terrain is automatically generated at user specified size. In Lumberyard, it is easy to paint a terrain or import terrain height map through terrain editor, accessed through Terrain Editor. Unlike in Unity where terrain is a GameObject, Lumberyard terrain can only be modified through the Terrain Editor. The functionality between the terrain editor in Lumberyard and terrain component in Unity are fairly similar, both allow for the terrain to be raised, lowered, smoothed, reset, etc. Lumberyard will typically have better performance with large terrain, and terrain generated content because of its background in AAA FPS games. Lumberyard also allows for the placement of roads, rather than painting as you would in Unity.
Lighting
[fix]From the perspective of Unity developer, lighting configurations are all over the place. A good option is always adding an environment probe to the level to control the overall brightness, and lights can be used for partial lighting. Time of Day should only be applied carefully if performance is not an issue. This is different from Unity, where manually adding and editing lights are the major way of changing illumination. To add a general light to a level, there are two ways to do this in Lumberyard. First, there is a light entity that can be dragged and dropped into the scene under Tools – RollupBar – Objects – Entity – Lights. However, Lumberyard no longer encourages this method and it will be removed sometime in the future updates. The second option is to create an empty entity in the level, and then add a light component to that entity. There are three types of lights to choose from, Point light, Area light, and Pojector light. Although different from Unity, a point light is an omni-directional light, and area light is a light emitter that has a length and a width. A projector light equals to a spotlight in Unity.
Fog
Lumberyard takes care of fog in a way similar to Unity, where fog is separated into two categories, Standard Fog and Volume Fog. Unlike Unity where standard fog can be edited under Camera View, Standard Fog in Lumberyard is handled under Time of Day editor where it can be found at Tools – Other – Time of Day. Volume Fog is similar to FogVolume, where volumetric fog is generated inside a cube to cover a certain area.