Real Earth Planet – Real-World Terrain, Roads & Railways Generator

- Built and tested on Unity 6000.3.21f1 with URP 17.3, and URP only: Built-in RP and HDRP are not supported.

- Tested on Windows desktop (Editor and player, D3D12). WebGL is not supported in 1.0; no mobile or console claims.

- Needs internet access when a region is built (Editor or player). Cached regions build offline.

- Per region: about 8 MB of downloads and cache (30–36 detailed tiles, 16 ring tiles, one map answer of about 0.8 MB).

- Measured on the reference PC (RTX 4090, 1920 × 1080, MSAA 4×): rails plan 6.5 s, terrain fit 2.3 s, ground and water 1.4 s, forest placement 0.35 s for the Landwasser region; 20–38 ms per frame with 63 000–163 000 trees and the water in the region view, including a GPU read-back.

- Terrain Holes must be enabled in the URP asset (the default) for tunnel mouths.

- The demo's mouse control uses the Input Manager ("Input Manager (Old)" or "Both").

- Package size: 307 MB. Everything is under Assets/RealEarthPlanet, the included Real Roads & Tracks under Assets/RealEarthPlanet/ThirdParty/RealRoadsAndTracks.

Click a place on a turning globe and get the real place in Unity: its real terrain at 1 m resolution, its real railway and roads laid with bridges, viaducts and tunnels, its rivers, lakes and forests — fetched and built at runtime. For the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) in Unity 6.3 (6000.3.21f1).

Choose a country, click a place and press Generate. Real Earth Planet downloads that place's elevation and its OpenStreetMap data on the spot, builds a 2 × 2 km Unity Terrain, plans the railway and the main roads over the real ground with Real Roads & Tracks 1.0 (included), carves the rivers, fills the lakes and plants the forests. Nothing about any place is stored in the package, so the whole planet is available without gigabytes of downloads. A region you built once comes back from the disk cache without the network.

Watch the overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrLMFcOjHY0

Five real places, ready to fly over

- Landwasser Viaduct, Switzerland — the Albula line crossing the gorge into the Landwasser tunnel, on 0.5 m swissALTI3D lidar.

- Garabit Viaduct, France — the 565 m railway viaduct over the Truyère reservoir and the A75 motorway bridges.

- Glenwood Canyon, USA — both I-70 carriageways through the 1.2 km Hanging Lake Tunnel, the Union Pacific line and the Colorado River.

- Kalte Rinne, Austria — the Semmering railway over the Kalte Rinne viaduct and through the Polleros tunnel.

- Loreley, Germany — both Rhine railways with their tunnels, the B 9 and the Rhine itself.

Each place is a checked entry in a plain C# table: its heights were compared with independent official point heights (within about half a metre where one exists) and its OpenStreetMap bridges and tunnels were checked against the built result. Add your own places the same way — any latitude and longitude works.

A globe you can pick from

- A turning Earth with day and night maps, city lights, clouds, an atmosphere rim and stars.

- Hover a country to highlight and name it, click to select it, click inside it to choose a place. The region box is drawn to true scale on the globe.

- One input path for the mouse and for your own code; events for "country selected", "place chosen" and "generate requested". uGUI interface, no IMGUI.

Real data, on demand, without keys

- Elevation from Mapterhorn terrain tiles: national lidar where it exists (for example 0.5 m swissALTI3D in Switzerland, 1 m USGS 3DEP in the USA, 1 m IGN RGE ALTI in France, 1 m BEV in Austria, 1 m DGM1 in Rhineland-Palatinate) and the global 30 m Copernicus base elsewhere. AWS Terrain Tiles are the automatic fallback.

- Roads, railways, waterways, lakes, forests and bare rock from OpenStreetMap in one Overpass query per region.

- No account, key or token for the defaults. Every endpoint is configurable, so a shipped game can use your own servers.

- A disk cache, at most 4 requests at a time, polite back-off when a server is busy, and every request logged.

Real terrain, real railways

- A 2048 × 2048 m Unity Terrain at 2049² (1 m cells) in an exact local frame: world metres are real metres. A 16 km horizon ring around it.

- The railway and the main roads are planned over the real ground by Real Roads & Tracks, held at the heights of the OpenStreetMap bridges and tunnels: viaducts over gorges, tunnels with fitted portals and terrain holes, cuttings and embankments within real grades. More lines per region where the place has them (both Rhine railways, both I-70 carriageways).

- Earthworks are capped so portal and bridge-end fills never wall off a gorge.

- Rivers are carved with a surface that only ever runs downhill; wide rivers mapped as areas (the Rhine, the Colorado) get a surface that falls with the river; lakes are levelled.

- Ground painted from slope, altitude, OpenStreetMap areas and the track corridors, drawn by a URP terrain shader built against visible tiling: hex tiling with rotation, a far texture scale, triplanar rock on cliffs, macro variation and grass colour patches.

- GPU-instanced forests at real density from the OpenStreetMap forest areas, trees on the meadows, two LODs.

Built for your code

- Every step is a public C# API: fetch, decode, resample, plan, build, paint, plant. A documented example builds one region from a latitude and longitude in under 100 lines.

- The data core and the OSM-to-track mapping are engine-free C# (no UnityEngine reference), with managed PNG and WebP decoders verified pixel for pixel against reference decoders.

- Attribution built in: an on-screen credit line and a notices file with the exact credit text for every data source and for each demo place.

- A skill file (Documentation/SKILL.md) explains the architecture, how to add locations and data providers and how to change the mapping — for you and for your AI coding assistant.

Real Roads & Tracks 1.0 included

The complete Real Roads & Tracks 1.0 (road, railway and roller-coaster generator and constructor) ships inside this package under Assets/RealEarthPlanet/ThirdParty/RealRoadsAndTracks, with its own GUIDs. If you already own Real Roads & Tracks, the same files are merged by GUID instead of being added twice.

Data and licences

- The package contains no map or elevation data. Data come from third-party services at runtime and stay in the user's cache.

- When a region is shown you must show "© OpenStreetMap contributors" (with openstreetmap.org/copyright) and the elevation credits; the Documentation gives the exact text per source and per demo place and explains the ODbL.

- The public Overpass servers and Mapterhorn's hosted tiles are community services for light use. For a shipped game, configure your own endpoints (documented).

What is not included

- Built-in and HDRP versions; WebGL.

- Metre-gauge and other non-standard gauges: railways are laid at 1.435 m.

- Masonry arch bridges: bridges use Real Roads & Tracks' girder, truss and steel-arch styles.

- Every road of a region as a built road: the main lines are built, other roads show as clearings.

- Satellite imagery, buildings and traffic.

Support

Questions and bug reports: Unity Discussions or cgteamorg@gmail.com. Please include your Unity version and the latitude and longitude of the region.

If Real Earth Planet helps your project, a rating on the Asset Store helps other developers find it. It is optional, and nothing depends on it.

Credits for the media on this page

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (openstreetmap.org/copyright). Elevation © Mapterhorn (mapterhorn.com/attribution) and its sources: © swisstopo (swissALTI3D); Source: IGN – RGE ALTI® / MNT LiDAR HD (accessed 2025–2026); Elevation: USGS 3DEP, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey; © BEV (ALS-DGM), CC BY 4.0; © GeoBasis-DE / LVermGeoRP 2025, dl-de/by-2-0. Star field: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. See Documentation/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

More from this family

- Real Roads & Tracks — procedural roads, railways and roller coasters (included here): https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/411734

- Geopolitical Earth Planet — the political globe with nine data layers: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/geopolitical-earth-planet-189702