By Coulter Heiberger · Updated
A real site in Unity from a real-world heightmap or ready-made meshes: no streaming SDK, no token, just the standard import pipeline.
A real-world heightmap is real elevation stored as a 16-bit grayscale image, and it is the quickest way to give a Unity Terrain the shape of an actual place. You can also stream terrain through an SDK like Cesium for Unity, or bring it in as plain geometry. For a specific site, a delivered bundle is simpler: draw the area on Mantle Place, order the bundle, and take its terrain, included at no extra cost. The OBJ imports natively, or use the GLB through a glTF importer package. The aerial imagery comes draped as the mesh texture, and the surrounding buildings come as a separate glTF layer. If you want a sculptable Unity Terrain object rather than a mesh, use the bundle’s heightmap too, though Unity’s terrain importer expects RAW, so plan a conversion step. There is no Mantle Place Unity plugin, and none is needed: standard files through the standard pipeline is the point.
Draw the area on Mantle Place and take the bundle’s heightmap: a 16-bit grayscale PNG of real elevation, clipped to your extent and free at 2 km² and under. The elevation is 1 m wherever USGS lidar covers the site.
Unity’s Import Raw reads 16-bit or 8-bit RAW, and the heightmap resolution must be a power of two plus one, such as 513, 1025, 2049, or 4097. Set Terrain Height to the elevation span the heightmap encodes, which the bundle manifest records, so the relief comes back at true scale.
Open the 16-bit PNG in an image editor or GIS that writes 16-bit RAW, resize it to the nearest power of two plus one (the bundle’s heightmap uses Unreal sizes such as 1009 or 2017), and save it as RAW with Windows byte order. Unity’s Terrain Tools package can also read a heightmap texture directly.
Yes. The data is not locked to Unity: the OBJ, GLB, and heightmap you import also open in Unreal, Blender, Godot, and more, so a prototype can change engines without fetching the site again.
Define the area of interest and order the bundle. In your vault, download the Real-time set, the meshes and heightmap, on every machine that needs it.
Add the OBJ terrain to your project for native import, or install a glTF importer package and bring in the GLB with its materials intact.
Confirm the import scale is meters and the up-axis matches Unity’s Y-up convention before placing gameplay or lighting.
Convert the heightmap PNG to 16-bit RAW and import it as a Unity Terrain heightmap when you need a sculptable terrain object instead of a mesh.
Drop in the buildings layer, add colliders and lighting, and treat the site like any other geometry in the project.
No. Cesium for Unity streams global tiles at runtime and is the right tool for planet-scale work. For one site, importing a bundle as plain meshes is simpler and carries no token or connection.
Yes. The site is ordinary geometry and textures baked into the build. Nothing streams, nothing expires, and the packaged project runs fully offline.
Yes, via the bundle’s heightmap PNG, included at no extra cost. Unity’s Terrain system imports heightmaps as 16-bit RAW, so convert the PNG first; after that the site behaves like any sculptable Unity Terrain.
Draw your area, read its Site Brief, and download a bundle you keep: terrain, imagery, CAD drawings, and more, ready for Unreal, Revit, Rhino, and more. $5 plus $2 per square kilometer, and 2 km² and under is free.
Native plugins: Mantle Place for Unreal and Mantle Place for Revit.
Enter the curator