Backwoods Gaming's Addons for Gaia

Thanks Mate! and sure using other Aspect Ratios are so funny

Thanks Shawn ; about the towers these are for Free provided by Unity, when the "5" came out:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/29140

 

For those who have been waiting, the update that required the script changes I posted earlier is now live for both Volumes 2 and 3 on the asset store. I just got notification they were approved a few minutes ago.

If you purchased from the web store, all downloads have been updated. You should be able to go to My Account and the updated download should have a 1_0_1 at the end of the package name. The exceptions to this would be the Village Areas pack which I had the changes in prior to submitting (but then forgot to change my pack script generator with the same changes - oops!) and the Islands pack which was completed after the bug was caught and fixed.

Speaking of the Islands pack, I finally wrapped up images for it and got it submitted to the asset store this morning. So hopefully within the next two weeks, it will go live. If you want it before then, run over to the web store and grab it there. It has already become a popular seller there.

Once again, thanks to all of you for your support. You have no idea what a little lifesaver this business opportunity has become. As always, let me know if there are certain types of areas you need for your game and I'll be happy to add them to my list of stamp types to create and work them in as I can.

 

Played around with the Islands pack a little a couple of nights ago. Unfortunately my internet has been screwing up with the weather the past week and every time I tried to upload a photo here to the forums it just sat there forever and never completed the upload. Finally today it let me post!

In the previous screenshots, I was working in Unity 5.1.0 which didn't seem to like the default water shader AQUAS installs. I'm assuming it is using some shader mojo that might have been released in a later version of Unity. I also used the default Gaia resources file which used the free broadleaf and conifer trees but didn't use the palms. I ended up stripping the conifers (a couple still spawned with POIs but they are actually defined as part of the POI) and deactivated the broadleafs from the cluster spawner. I duplicated the broadleaf in both spawners and added the palms switching off the perlin and changing that field to none. Below are a few of the screenshots of the islands area made using a couple of the stamps in the Vol 4 Islands pack.







As stated in the earlier post, the pack is available on my web store and has been submitted to the asset store and is awaiting review.

I am currently working on the next pack which is going to be Coastal Areas. @TheSeawolf - I did end up combining the coastal type areas you suggested into a single pack. I have three stamps ready to stamp and do final testing. The rest of the batch failed my initial stamp creation QC and will be pulled back into Photoshop for some additional edits which I missed in the first round of Photoshop work. I've collected a variety of bays, inlets, and promontories/points which should make for some interesting coastal type areas which will make up Vol 5 - Coastal Areas.

I have additionally started preliminary work of Vol 6 - Glens and Highlands which will contain a lot of valley type areas surrounded by hills and mountains. I'm just getting ready to pull them into Gaia's scanner to evaluate further work that might be necessary in Photoshop.

I'm hoping to have at least one, if not both, of these packs ready for web release/asset store submission by the April 16th release date for the next pack.

Thanks again everyone for your continued support!

 

All packs on asset store should now have been updated with the latest code to avoid the build issue that @smada luap brought to my attention.

 

Work is progressing on the Coastal Stamps Pack. Here is a screenshot of a scene view of the coast I'm currently working on. I'm still tweaking it and this is just a basic Gaia spawn with all standard texture stuff, unity water, and unity lighting.

Is this the kind of coast you was looking for as far as promontories, @TheSeawolf?

 

Hey gang. I'm starting to dig into some of the planning for the Point of Interest Packs. The first four packs are going to be based off of themes of the first four stamp packs, Forest Outposts, Mountain Homesteads, Desert, and Island. At this point the only artist I'm collaborating on with environment stuff for these is Cobus with the 3DForge Interior and Exterior Kits. The interior kit only for props not yet available in exterior kit. These are only exterior POIs but they will be based on the modular buildings in the kit or current blueprints so you can add your own interiors if you want. I may have my artist do a couple interior variations to contribute to the community as blueprints on Cobus' site, but those wouldn't be specific to a pack, just specific to a building size grid and only the inner floorplan (ie: not insides of exterior walls so you can put your own walls up around outside of floorplan to match the style of your buildings exteriors (line up exterior doors, windows, etc).. Haven't really thought floorplan blueprints through yet, but willing to eventually donate a couple to the community.

At any rate, what are some points of interest you would find useful that can be done with current buildings / parts available in the exteriors kit? Some of the thoughts I have for the first kit is one medium and one small village laid out with homes, merchant area, stables, inn and/or trades areas (smith/tanner/clothier/ etc). Numbers and types of buildings dependent upon village size. Small may only have an inn, merchant, and a couple of houses - more like an outpost while medium might have several houses, a tradesmith, a couple merchant booths, and an inn. I was also thinking of a bandit camp, a trading post, and maybe a homestead.

I'm looking at having 4-5 POIs per pack and I plan to have the pack include texture maps for ground texture/grass spawning based on the layout of the POI. I am also talking with a couple of asset producers about the thought of a POI Manager type object that could detect if their asset is present and if so the POI Manager could add whatever the information would need for their asset to see it. Thoughts are a village icon might pop on in for the POI to show a village in your map asset, or preconfigured zone information to allow you to have different settings and ambiance if it is a abandoned cemetery.. The thoughts around this is still preliminary and may not make the first pack or two, but if I can work out some collaborative partnerships with a few folks and I can get the manager set up to detect and set up their assets for the POI that has been spawned, that is the direction I'd like to go with it.

Ok.. So hit me up with suggestions! I'd love to hear what types of things you would like to see in these packs and what you think they might be worth!

Also, I'd love to see some feedback and screenshots of what you guys are doing with the stamps you have purchased. The thread has gone kind of silent other than my rambling and a couple of other folks posting. Would love to see what you all are coming up with and ideas for the stamps packs. Stamp types, thoughts of ways to improve the packs, or whatever.

Once again, thank you for all of your support!

 

For me, an area of interest needs a flat terrain area - that's the biggest requirement. If you have a gorgeous looking terrain it tends not to have flat areas you can build on for example. When I use the Unity terrain editor to flatten areas it always looks out of place, so terrain stamps with flat areas would be awesome!

 

Thanks for the input! The Village Area Stamps Pack has a small area that is more ideal for a small village in the center of the stamps, but hit and miss aside from that. @wolfen231 and I were talking on Skype earlier tonight about the waterfall stamps and through the conversation he was explaining a method of extracting an area from a mesh or heightmap in max. This was my original vision for the stamp packs but I ended up going with the whole terrain. If we can work out the process, I'm going to update some of the packs to have some smaller stamps which are cutouts of an actual village area, or an actual volcano, or an actual waterfall. That way those types of features are easily stamped with their existing terrain as well as a copy of them which is pretty much just the specific area that can be stamped and blended easier within a terrain. He was going to do some testing with the process after work (he is in China time).. Hopefully if we can get that figured out, we can update the previous packs (where required) and provide a lot more variety of stamps and how you can use them with the future packs.

I know the one coastal area stamp I just finished working on (images above) has a huge flatter area with slightly rolling hills on 2/3 of the land area. It will be nice for villages and such. Also one of the things I do for areas I put houses on is instead of using flatten, I find smooth to be a little more natural. That way it isn't totally flat, but flat enough that it is usable as house/village area but not super flat. Also it sounds like today's 24 hour deal would be good for helping with that with better terrain molding brushes and functions. It looked like a good Gaia companion product. Use Gaia for stamping out terrain and then use it to replace the unity terrain tools for the shaping and molding fine tuning.

But more stamps with flatter areas/valleys for the full terrains are in the pipeline and we are definitely working to figure out ways to have some more defined detail stamps to make it easier to blend a detail village area cutout type stamp into existing terrains. I'll post more details as they are available. And those of you who bought the village area pack will get some new stamps as we get the bugs worked out. Maybe the other packs too, but they pretty much are area type stamps whereas the village area stamp probably would have been what we are working to figure out how to do if I had that process worked out beforehand. Totally open to thoughts on this!

Also, I have deprecated the sampler pack. With trying to manage that pack along with all the other stuff and trying to figure out traffic and performance and all that stuff, my head was starting to spin trying to figure out why numbers were so much larger and I think it was the free pack. The packs are already so cheap, it isn't like someone has to spend $30 or more to try them out. Plus I was getting no ratings or reviews, so I'm not sure it was worth the confusion at this point. I may at some point put an evaluation option up on the website where I at least have the ability to follow up with the person. Unfortunately I don't have that kind of capability here.

Let me know if you think of any other suggestions for the stamps packs and open to ideas for the upcoming POI packs as well!

 

Thanks Shawn, I'm just starting out with selling assets myself and it's a steep learning curve

 

Yup.. Amazing how much stuff you have to do that has nothing to do with making the assets.. heheh Trying to wrap your head around everything with a normal brain is hard enough.. When brain only fires on all cylinders for about an hour and then starts messing with you on top of trying to figure this stuff out.. Talk about a nightmare! lol

I saw your announcement for audio pack today.. Some cool clips there! Good luck with it and your building pack for uConstruct

 

The most time consuming thing I found was (apart from writing the docs lol) was getting screenshots prepared for inclusion on the asset page

 

I actually enjoyed writing documentation, sad I know haha but yeah the images were the hardest, especially when one of your assets is a batch of audio tracks!

 

yeah same for me. I need flat areas where i can place additional stuff
easily. in gaia words, places where the fitness for the placement of village exterior stuff is high

 

Thanks for the input! Hopefully we can get this new stamp style worked out so you can easily take and stamp an actual village area into your scene. This might even be an enhancement I add into the POI Packs. Create custom stamps fitted for the POIs so you can stamp areas within your main terrain where you would prefer some of the POIs to spawn. That might take some tricky magic with sizing and ordering of the POI spawning, but a cool thought..

But I definitely feel your pain with the POIs and building placement. The main problem with building them into a big stamp is then everyone's terrains would be spawning in the same areas. The same center area not too bad since normally the center of a zone will usually contain some type of outpost or key area. But if all the flat places are the same for everyone, not sure I like that solution as much as figuring out and creating just small special detail stamps. So that is definitely coming.

Any other requests or recommendations? Interest in POI Packs? The first few packs will be working with Village Exteriors Kit stuff. Would love feedback on what you guys would like to see in those as well.

And again, thanks for the input!

 

@Shawn67 I know you're loving what you're doing and we're all grateful, but I am still left with part 1 and waiting for part 2

 

Can you do terrain brushes for slopes?!

 

Yup.. I know.. It is coming, I promise. That is another thing that is on the agenda after I get the stamps pack out this weekend. Between computer problems, the behind the scenes stuff required to run business, and a temporary health setback earlier this week, I have kind of let the tutorial slip through the cracks. I was just looking at the learning addon I had picked up for my website this morning to get ready to transfer the last tutorial into it and prep for the next one. The goal is to get to a point where the tutorial series is a weekly thing. Hopefully after this week, I can get into that flow. Sorry for the delay.

I wouldn't even know how to begin making brushes. But I might be able to look into making some of the new type of detail stamps for slopes, once we work out the production details.

 

For those waiting for the next tutorial, I got halfway through converting into the new learning system earlier. Just need to clean it up a bit and I want to replace the old images with ones from the new terrain I'm working off of - since I lost the original. I also worked up a rough outline of what is coming up in the rest of the course. I may be changing up things a little, but this is pretty close to what the final series will look like:

1. Hello World - Creating the Initial Terrain
2. Forming the Landscape - Stamping the Large World
3. Slice and Dice: Slicing the Terrain into Manageable Chunks
4. Detail, Detail, Detail: Adding Features to Individual Tiles with Detail Stamps
5. Intro to Biomes: Different Spawners for Different Environments
6. Adding Life: Creating Wildlife Game Object Spawners
7. Course Review: Small Review Summary and short quiz to make sure you paid attention.. heheh

If you can think of other things that might be useful, let me know. Keep in mind, none of these are going to be super detailed to tell you everything you need to know about spawning... Or basic stamping. We are attacking how to deal with this stuff in our huge sliced world. I'm going to try to touch base with @MakeCodeNow before getting to part 6. I'm assuming that creatures can cross into the other sectrs when streaming. Actually that might be a better question for @BHS regarding Emerald or @icetec about ICE allowing creatures controlled by their AI assets to cross from one streamed scene to another. I have both. If both of them support it, I'll try to highlight how to do it with both of them in tutorial 6. If not, I'll do whichever one supports it. Pressure is on, BHS and Pit.. heheh But mainly that session will touch base on setting up the animals with their assets and how to set up your spawners for each individual terrain chunk and setting things up so they are able to stream across to the other terrain (when the player is in range for them to be active and the neighbor is streamed). Any input from Nate or the AI guys on this would be awesome!

If there are more detailed tutorial classes you guys want on stamping, spawners, POIs, etc.. Hit me up and I'll try to get either myself, Adam, or someone else to do either a class type tutorial series like this one or a video tutorial. I'll be helping Adam get the tutorials and videos on both the Backwoods Gaming and Procedural Worlds sites this coming week. If there are any tutorials for Gaia which are already out there that you know of, shoot me the link and I'll get permission from the author to link to it from the sites, as well as offer to host it for them in a tutorial format on Backwoods Gaming if it is just sitting in a forum post somewhere. I know of one in the ORK forums that was started about using it with ORK.

At any rate, instead of rambling on.. I'll leave you with some more rough screenies of the new Coastal Stamps Pack that I'm trying to finish up in the next few days. Keep in mind, my workspace for stamp development is 5.1.0 to keep everything in the packs compatible with earliest version of Unity which Gaia supports. So this is Unity 5.1.0 with Unity lighting and effects, Unity water, and just the art assets which ship with Gaia. I modified spawner criteria by duplicating the default game object spawner twice. In all game object spawners, I switched them to Random. In the first GO spawner I set everything to inactive and then activated one of the medium farms and set max instances to 5 and both small villages with max instance set to 1. With the stamp in an unfinished state, all 7 found suitable places to spawn with no problem. In the second GO spawner I again set everything to inactive and then enabled small farms 1, 3, and 5 setting each of their max instances to 20. They spawned 19, 14, and 20 with no problems. In the 3rd GO spawner, I again set everything to inactive and then enabled the three rock groups and the copse at the bottom. I changed the setting of each of the max values of these to 200. They spawned 23, 69, 3, and 5. I probably would have ran this another time or two if this was my final terrain. For now, that is fine. I then left trees and details at default and spawned each of these. Below is a top down scene view of the stamped and spawned terrain as well as a couple of early screen shots. Keep in mind, I still have some coastal smoothing and some tuning to go. And keep in mind this is straight Unity with no AQUAS or Distingo which I normally use in screenshots. Those will be in the screenshots when I import my test scenes into 5.3.4 to create all the final marketing screenshots that I'll need..

 

I was chatting with @turboscalpeur last night and he shared with me a video he made to showcase his grass packs. The terrain he is using in the video was stamped with one of my Vol 1 Village Area pack stamps! Thanks for sharing @turboscalpeur!

EDIT: Turbo informed me I posted the pack wrong and he actually used the village area pack. Editing to change and add link. Also the grasses he used are from his two grass packs:

HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol. 1
HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol. 2

If you don't already have them, I highly recommend them. At this point they are the only grass packs I use. Well other than his ferns pack.

 

Man he does sexy foliage textures. Love his stuff. Now to play with water fall stuff huh? hehe

 

Islands - Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Vol 4 is now live on the asset store!

Coastal Areas - Vol 5 should be submitted by the end of weekend. Finishing up stamp testing now.

Part 2 of the Creating a 32k World tutorial should be live by the weekend.

Glens & Highlands - Vol 6 will probably be a little late, possibly up to a week. I have half of the work done. I just need to finish editing and then do stamp testing.

Still working on groundwork for the POI Packs. With some of the additional features I've decided to add, I'm hoping I can get it all pulled together to release Vol 1 of those by the end of the month.

 

Keep up the great work

 

Some Screens from a Backwoods Gaming Stamp in Gaia just did it fastly in 5 min.^^

 

Are those using the same terrain you stamped with a Village Area stamp for the video I shared earlier?

Awesome work, as always, @turboscalpeur!

 

Yep exactly

 

Coastal area stamps pack will be available at my web store as well as submitted to asset store tomorrow.. Here are a couple of shots from one of the stamps... Daytime on the Coast.. Using Time of Day for sky and AQUAS for water.. All grasses and trees from Gaia defaults..





Posted nighttime shots from the same general area looking in both directions in the Gaia thread.. Nighttime shots are using Tenkoku and Suimono.

 

Hi guys,

Just I've made some screenshots with a few awesome assets!

Assets used:

• Gaia
• Mountain and Volcano - Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Vol 2
• HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol 1
• Time of Day
• Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion
• Cinematic Image Effects

Result after a few minutes:

 

Wow... I've never had to fight so hard to get two images posted! lol Finally got the two day images added to my last post. I did a couple more shots playing with normal and evening settings in Tenkoku on a different stamp from the new pack.. Let's see if these will attach! rofl







@TheSeawolf - I noticed you posted in the Tenkoku thread about how dark the night can be. That third one should give you a good idea of the settings of Tenkoku's night using the Night setting in the Gaia eXtension @chingwa made for his Tenkoku package.

EDIT: The three screenshots in this post are just using Gaia, Tenkoku, and Suimono.

 

Wow!! there are a lot of creativity in tha' place that Saturday!! Awesome guyzz

 

Coastal Area Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia, Vol 5 now available on web store and submitted to asset store!

If you want it now, here is the web store link!

 

I bought the first 4, I like using the Unity Store though(don't know why exactly) so I'm waiting on that to get the 5th, plus a few other things. The worst part is that I'm working on a missile command clone, set mostly in space, and can't get use of these(or GAIA or other things I've bought) but I can't help it.

 

Thanks for the support! I have a bad habit of stockpiling stuff myself. A lot of different things that have nothing to do with any of the types of games I've currently got planned.. heheh

 

With volume five of the stamps pack released, those of you who have been waiting for the Gaia and Sectr series will be happy. I'm sitting down to finish the lesson page layout for my tutorials pages this morning. Task for the day is to get the new tutorial system live on the website, re-publish the first tutorial in the 32k terrain using Gaia and Sectr series in the tutorial system, and then write and publish lesson 2 on stamping the terrain. Hopefully I can get the train that had been previously derailed back on track and get these rolling out once a week as I had originally planned.

Thanks to all of you who have been waiting for your continued patience.

 

Wow.. Rough day! I discovered today that writing is one of the things that triggers the brain fog / fatigue. I would write a paragraph and get lost.. Take a break and come back to write a couple more, and get lost again. I forced myself to not get distracted on doing anything else while on the computer today though and was finally able to get through the second lesson of the tutorial which covers the stamping process. Stamping the base terrain which serves as my ocean floor and then using the grid we made in the first lesson using Sectr to determine how to stamp my islands. I was working off of screenshots that I had already saved which were before I finished the Islands Pack that just went live on the AS, but there are a couple of stamps that I used that will be part of a second islands pack down the road as well as stamps I made from terrains in assets I have purchased. I can't distribute those, but if you own packs with demo terrains you can use Gaia to scan the terrain into a stamp to use in your huge world.

Next week I will cover using Sectr to slice all of our terrains into pieces and save them into their own scenes. I will also cover how to properly load and unload Sectrs once sliced so that your work gets saved correctly as well as talk about excluding things so they are used by all of the scenes so you don't have to install them in every one, such as your ocean and sky.

The new learning system is a little weird in the way it has a Buy button to start the course. The course is free so there is no charge. This is one of the things I need to work on when brain power allows. I started messing with it today and finally decided it would be better to get the lesson done since I'm so far behind with it.

Enjoy!

http://assets.backwoodsgaming.com/tutorials/32k-world-creation-using-gaia-sectr/

 

With Coastlines done, the Highlands stamps pack almost finished (had a lot of it and the coastlines one mapped out right when computer started having issues so have stamps made and just going through testing), and lesson 2 of the 32k terrain tutorial published I decided to take a step back and dig into coding session support into the extension for the stamp packs. Hopefully if all goes well, I can crack it this week so I can release with the Highlands pack which I plan to release by the end of the weekend. Then I'll go back and update existing stamps packs with the updated extension and add my sessions which were made when I stamped each of the stamps in my test scenes.

Wish me luck!

Oh.. Here is a teaser of the Highlands. The only thing extra added was Tenkoku for the skies. I still need to add Distingo to get rid of some of the texture tiling. But here is a first glance of the Highlands001 stamp from the next pack.

 

Worked out the code for adding session playback into the stamps pack extension. What this means is you will be able to play back the sessions as I stamped and spawned them when testing. I still have a few things I want to try to add and change around, but I should have everything ready and running properly when I release the Highlands pack this weekend. Once that is released and Sunday's tutorial is published, I will go back and update pack volumes 1-5.

 

UGH! Coastal Area stamp pack was declined due to "JPG textures". I resubmitted explaining that the only JPGs in the pack are the ones used to give the little heightmap preview image in Gaia's stamper. These are not meant to be used for anything other than that. As @tapticc discovered early on when he posted earlier in this thread, trying to use those as the stamp will give a minecraft-like world. Great, if that is what you are after! heheh But not so great when you are wanting terrains like the ones being showcased by folks here in the thread.

At any rate. It has been resubmitted and I also questioned the having to wait in the bottom of the queue when something is having to be resubmitted due to reviewer error. So hopefully we can get the submission issue resolved and pack on the AS soon!

EDIT: Coast Area - Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Vol 5 is now LIVE!

 

Hey gang. Getting all the stuff ready for the session support this past week really sapped a lot out of me. I was able to get the Highlands pack added to the web store. Thanks to those of you who already purchased it! I'm hoping to finish up with the into video and screenshots today and tomorrow. Schedule is kind of off again today. I just woke up again and am hoping to get the voice-over done for the video I made to introduce the session support done here in a few. If I can figure this out, I may switch the tutorial series I am trying to do using Gaia and Sectr to a video format. My biggest obstacle with videos is my computer isn't the best and tends to lag out pretty bad when recording the video part. But we'll see how it goes. The whole writing portion of creating a tutorial is killing me.

At any rate, Highlands Stamps Pack is live on web store and will be submitted to AS store within the next couple of days.

 

Hey gang.. Here is a video showcasing the new session playback feature built into the new Stamps Pack extension. All packs moving forward with have this and I'll work over the next couple of weeks to update existing packs to include it as well.

 

I've been a bit under the weather this week and have fallen behind. I just now clicked submit on the Highlands stamps pack to the asset store. As always, it is available on my web store if you don't want to wait. This pack has stamps which were originally modeled after the Glens and other areas of western Scotland.

The wetlands pack that I originally had scheduled to release this weekend is being pushed back a week. So no release this weekend. If all goes well and i can wrap my head back around the computer stuff this coming week, we should have it ready by next weekend. Sorry for the delay.

Here are some of the shots from the Highlands pack:








Currently available on our web store.
Finally submitted to asset store tonight. (404 until approved)
All shown assets come with Gaia except for the skies which are from Tenkoku.

 

Highlands pack is now live on the asset store! That was quick!

 

Hey gang.. I'm at a point I am looking for some feedback. The goal of the packs was originally to have both stamps packs and POI packs of a similar theme hitting the asset store about the same time. I've fallen behind on getting the POI Packs ready and have been cruising through releasing the stamps packs. I'm considering stepping back and delaying the next stamps packs until I can get caught up with spawner packs. I would love to get some feedback from you guys.

I have my cousin working on laying out the POIs for the first pack but I am thinking if while he is doing those, I focus on the POIs for the second pack, between the two of us we can get them caught up to where we can start releasing the matching stamp and spawner packs at the same time.

You will also notice that I am now calling it a Spawner Pack. One thing I was thinking today is why just do the POIs when I could provide spawners for complete environments. So I am considering making it so if you have the required packs, you could spawn grasses, trees, rocks, and other things in addition to the POIs.

The GX may look something like the one below, but instead of sections for Resources and Spawners, there would be a section for Turboscalpeur Grasses HQ 2 pack, and a section for SpeedTree Desktop Trees Pack 2, and a section for 3DForge Exteriors Kit.. And then depending on which of those assets you own, you would be able to add the resources and spawners for them into your scene in order to complete the environment.



Thoughts?

 

Sounds interesting, but one thing I'm not sure: you want to create some spawner rules for various assets, that's it ?

 

Hey Shawn, just wanted to share some screenshots showing scenes made with the Highlands stamps pack.
As usual, useful addons for Gaia from Backwoods Gaming!






Assets used:

• Gaia
• Highlands - Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Vol 6
• HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol 1 & 2
• SpeedTree Hero Tree Package
• Time of Day
• Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion
• Volumetric Fog & Mist
• Tonemapping & Color Grading from Cinematic Image Effects

 

Essentially, yes it will be a variety of spawner rule for various art packs. Basically that is all POIs are as well. The main part of the pack will still be a collection of POIs, but instead of just doing the POIs I thought about adding in the other spawner information for the other spawns as well in order to provide a complete spawn configuration for the theme the POIs are being built for. What would everyone want to see? A complete spawner/resources configuration? Or sole focus on POIs?

 

I think if you provide resources config the users will appreciate. It's always good to see how it's done just as an example, use it just plain, or use it as a base for customization.

 

Since I had already begun processing the stamps for the next pack when I decided I needed to step back and focus on catching up with the Spawner/POI Packs, I decided to push through and go ahead and get it done before backtracking down the POI trail. Here are a couple of first peeks..





In addition to Gaia and the new Vol 7 stamps pack, I used:

• Tenkoku for sky from @chingwa
• AQUAS for water from @dogmachris
• Volumetric Fog & Mist for wetlands ground fog from @Thrawn75
• HQ Grasses 2 from @turboscalpeur

 

Wetlands - Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Vol 7 is now available for purchase on the web store. It was also submitted to the asset store for review this morning. The stamps in this pack are modeled after various wetlands areas of the United States. From bayous in Louisiana to lowland marshes and floodplains in the northern US. The images I showed previously used more of what I would consider a wetlands look. But the images I submitted the pack with used standard Gaia resources which shows more of a floodplain type look.

This stamps pack will be the last I work on this month. I need to backtrack through previous packs and update them with the session playback part of my extension and get sessions bundled up. I will also be putting focus into the POI/Spawner packs to get them caught up. Those were always intended to be released at the same time as a companion pack but I feel like I've dropped the ball. They are definitely coming! The wetlands one will include more swamp camp type houses, where the houses are on stilts and sit in the shallows of the water.

At any rate, here are a couple of the images from the wetlands stamps pack. These images use the following:

• Tenkoku - sky system
• Suimono - water system
• Volumetric Fog & Mist - ground/water surface fog
• Beautify and Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion - camera effects
• uNature (formerly Trees Manager System) - tree/grass management

EDIT: Oops.. Knew I was forgetting something.. Web Store Link | Asset Store Link [submitted May 13th - will show 404 until approved.]

 

Hey gang. I know you guys are probably getting tired of hearing me talk about the POI Packs. But I am finally making progress on them now that they have my focus. Focus is still split between that and a volunteer project, but the POI Packs and getting existing stamps packs updated to include sessions has my Backwoods Gaming focus.

So news about the POI Packs. Each POI Pack will be made as a companion pack for the same volume of stamps pack and will feature a primary art pack as the focal asset for the points of interest built for the pack. In addition to the POI spawner, I am also working to include some default grass and tree spawners which will either use grasses and trees from the featured environment pack, if they are included in the pack, or grasses from @turboscalpeur's packs / trees from SpeedTree packs / trees and grasses from ForestVision in cases where they are not.

The first POI Pack will be a forest outposts pack based off of the 3DForge Village Interior Kit and Village Exterior Kit for buildings and props. So far we have two bandit / trader type camps, two woodlands homesteads, and a trading post POI in development. There are two other POIs which we have yet to start, but my cousin is supposed to be getting the layouts for them done this week or weekend. Following are art assets to be required by the packs with work currently in progress. There will be options to spawn the POIs with or without trees. Same for grasses. So any tree or grass packs mentioned, while recommended for best results, will be optional.

Vol 1 - Forest Outposts POI Pack for Gaia
Primary art asset: - Village Exteriors Kit by 3DForge
Optional art asset - Village Interiors Kit by 3DForge (extra props)
Optional trees asset - Desktop Trees Pack by SpeedTree (Eastern US tree varieties)
Optional grasses asset - HQ Grasses 1 by Turboscalpeur (grasses and gardens)

Vol 2 - Mountain Homesteads POI Pack for Gaia
Primary art asset: - Village Exteriors Kit by 3DForge
Optional art asset - Village Interiors Kit by 3DForge (extra props)
Optional trees and grasses - ForestVision by BauerVision (trees and grasses)
Optional grasses - Ferns World by Turboscalpeur (ferns.. what else would it be? )

Vol 3 - Desert Wastelands POI Pack for Gaia
Primary art asset - Extreme Wastelands Pack by Vertigo Games
- I still have to dig into this pack and start working with it to layout the POIs. So not sure everything that is include as far as wasteland type grasses, trees, etc. So may add more optional packs to this pack as well.

Vol 7 - Wetlands POI Pack for Gaia
Primary art asset: - Village Exteriors Kit by 3DForge
Optional art asset - Village Interiors Kit by 3DForge (extra props)
Optional trees asset - Desktop Trees Pack 2 by SpeedTree (Bald Cyprus, Magnolia, Chinese Banyan and River Birch)
Optional grasses asset - HQ Grasses 2 by Turboscalpeur (cattails and wetlands type grasses)

I know I'm missing some volumes there. But these are ones I've already worked out assets for. I would love to get more artists to collaborate with to get some packs made for different genres as well. So if you or someone you know is an environment pack artist and would be interested in being featured/cross-promoted with our POI Packs, contact me. From the stamps pack list, you can see that I haven't nailed down POI packs for islands, coastlines, or highlands yet.

Ok.. Things that are planned to come with the POI Packs include:

• Gaia resource files for each POI
• Gaia resource file for optional trees
• Gaia resource for optional grasses
• Master Gaia resources file if you own all of the primary and optional packs.
• Stencil masks for imprinting the paths/roads/worn areas
• Grass and texture spawner masks
• A base stamp to be stamped below the POI before the objects are dropped onto it.
• A Gaia extension to automate the process so all this can be easily added into your scene

As noted earlier, these are the spawners only. NO art assets are actually distributed with these packs. They are only the files Gaia needs in order to find and spawn items from the packs into your Gaia environment along with other Gaia files used by the points of interest (stencil, stamp, etc).

If all goes well, I will have Forest Outposts ready to release by late next week! (Barring any problems...)

 

Have you been contacted at all by other asset publishers? I reached out to some and a few wrote back saying they'd get in touch with you. But wonder if they were just saying that to get me to go away