Polaris 3.5: A Smoother Onboarding and Better Terrain Migration

Polaris 3.5 adds a new Migration Tool for moving terrain data between Polaris, Unity Terrain, meshes, RAW heightmaps, and texture sets. This time the tool works on terrain groups, not one terrain at a time like before. We also reworked the onboarding flow, added quick tutorials, put help inside the editor, and added terrain texture previews.

Terrain Work Does Not Stay in One Place

In our experience, terrain work rarely stays inside one tool.

You may start with an existing Unity Terrain. You may generate a heightmap somewhere else. You may bring in a mesh from Blender or Houdini, refine the scene in Unity, export the data for another pass, then come back later when the terrain direction changes again.

We built Polaris 3.5 around that reality.

The main thing in this release is a new Migration Tool for importing and exporting terrain data. It replaces the old Data Tool windows, which only worked on one terrain at a time, with a workflow we designed for terrain groups and scenes that have multiple tiles. On top of that, the release improves the first use experience with onboarding, Quick Help, inspector tutorials, and texture previews.

What we were after is simple enough: make Polaris easier to get into, easier to learn, and easier to use as one piece of a wider terrain toolchain.

The New Migration Tool: Bring Terrain In, Send It Back Out

The old Data Tool workflow was spread across separate utility windows, and each one only operated on a single terrain. That was fine for isolated tasks, but it got limiting once a scene used multiple terrain tiles, or when the data source covered a larger region in world space.

So in Polaris 3.5 we pulled those workflows together into the Migration and Export wizard.

The new Migration Tool works on terrain groups in world space. One source file can cover a full terrain grid with multiple tiles, and each Polaris terrain just samples the proportional region that belongs to it. Instead of slicing up source data for every tile by hand, you get to work with the terrain layout as one connected scene.

Bring Existing Terrain Into Polaris

The new import paths cover the most common ways terrain data ends up in a Unity project.

Mapping source Unity Terrains to Polaris terrains, and choosing what to bring across.

Unity Terrain import brings across height, holes, splat layers, trees, and grass. Splat layers can come over as control maps or get baked into an albedo map, depending on how you want to keep working in Polaris.

Static Mesh import gives you a path in from tools like Blender, Houdini, or something similar. Polaris samples the source mesh height and rebuilds the result through its own geometry engine. It is handy for moving a terrain shape into Polaris, but I would not treat it as a perfectly identical mesh copy. Things like overhangs need a different approach, because a terrain heightmap simply cannot represent every arbitrary mesh shape.

RAW Heightmap import supports RAW files with 8 bit or 16 bit depth. A single file can fill one terrain or a whole grid of tiles, which makes it practical for larger layouts you generated outside Unity.

Texture Set import rebuilds editable Polaris terrain data back out of textures. It supports height, albedo, metallic, splat control, and hole maps, so it is useful when another tool already spits terrain data out as an image set.

Send Terrain Data Back Out

Terrain pipelines are iterative, so you also need a way to send data back out when another tool or system expects a specific representation.

Unity Terrain export pushes geometry, splat layers, trees, and grass back into Unity Terrain. This one is useful when some other system in your project still depends on Unity Terrain data.

RAW Heightmap export writes terrain height into a RAW file with configurable resolution, bit depth, byte order, and row order. That gives you a fairly general handoff format for terrain tools that work with height data.

Texture Set export writes heightmap, splat controls, albedo, and metallic data out as PNG files. This is a practical route for image editing, or for tools that just consume terrain textures directly.

Mesh export writes the rendered terrain mesh as OBJ, with optional albedo and metallic textures. Use this when you need a mesh representation for external work.

A Polaris terrain exported to OBJ and opened in Blender. The mesh comes across as many chunks per tile, with the albedo texture applied, ready for external work.

The result, we think, is a more interoperable Polaris workflow. You can bring in a terrain foundation, shape and stylize it in Polaris, send the data off to another tool when you need to, and then come back to Polaris for another editing pass.

A Smoother First Session

Polaris 3.5 also improves the first experience after you install it.

The onboarding page explains the Wizard and how to reopen it any time.

The Wizard now opens on its own the first time you import, and shows a short guide for getting to the main Polaris menus. This helps new users find terrain creation, tools, project settings, and the extra editor windows without hunting through Unity menus.

Once you are past first setup, the Wizard also has a Quick Help page, which gives you the Polaris help database without leaving the editor. We revised the Q&A content around practical topics, such as getting started, common workflows, editor menus, and settings.

Searching the Quick Help Q&A from inside the editor.

Guidance Where You Need It

Some questions only come up once you actually start working with a tool.

Polaris 3.5 adds quick tutorials inside the inspector for the key tools. These guides run once on first use and can be skipped completely. We meant them to explain the immediate workflow, not to turn every editor interaction into a permanent tutorial.

A quick tutorial running over the New Terrain window. Each step explains the field next to it, with Next to continue or Skip all tutorials to dismiss them for good.

A More Useful Terrain Inspector

The Terrain Inspector now has a more useful texture preview panel. You can inspect the height map, color map, metallic map, mask map, and color by height map right in the Unity Inspector preview area. Channel isolation for RGBA, R, G, B, and A makes it easier to look into packed texture data and figure out unexpected terrain results.

The Terrain Inspector preview panel. Pick which map to view, here the color map, and switch between RGBA or a single channel to inspect packed texture data.

Wrap Up

The new Migration Tool makes Polaris easier to bring into an existing project, and easier to connect with the rest of a terrain pipeline. The onboarding flow, Quick Help page, inspector tutorials, and texture previews are there to make that wider workflow easier to find and easier to work with.

If your terrain process involves multiple tiles, external terrain tools, Unity Terrain data, or repeated handoffs between applications, then we think Polaris 3.5 is worth the update.

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