GAIA - AAA terrain generator, procedural texturing, planting and scene creation

Check out the unboxing of Gaia by 80.lv - super cool


Gotta go pack for GDC and head off the the plane - its a bit of a hike from Sydney in Oz - see you on the other side and hope to meet you all there. Will be on the Unity stand on Wednesday

 

Good Luck and enjoy meeting everyone
Those of us that can not be there is very jealous

 

When you say `see you on the other side` I assume you mean still on earth.

Edit - Not actually going to GDC but clarification is always good as I want to check you gaia support and update roadmap.

 

I don't know if San Francisco technically qualifies as 'Earth'.

 

Since I was taught about the San Andreas fault at school all those years ago I have never wanted to visit the west coast of the USA. I have this feeling I may be the trigger Although I do like the look of Seattle to Iowa. Very nice countryside there so if ever visit the usa I may venture that far west.

@AdamGoodrich - seriously, have a good journey

 

That's the point to bring there a terrain expert. Something serious is happening there hahaha

 

@Thrawn75 brings up a good point

 

I ve just found out that there is a GDC 50% Discount of some Speedtrees Desktop Packages on the Unity5 Assetstore. So now perhaps it's more affordable I am really trying to get some money together for the Desktop Tree Package...

Using Code "GDC2016" will give you 35$ discount on the Speedtree Store.Sou you can get the Hero Package cheaper on Speedtree store (84$) than on the Unity5 Store. Desktop Tree Package is cheaper on Unity5 Store.

Somebody working with Hero Models? How is the performance regarding to Desktop Models so far?

Cheers
Ronny

 

I'm planning to be in New York when it's my 50th birthday. Why do I have a feeling that all the disaster movies, etc. that seem to quite happily lay waste to the city are going to occur when I'm stood in the middle of Central Park? rofl

 

Just let us all know when you are 50, no a few months before so we can all prepare as I imagine the global ramifications would affect us all!

 

I turn 50 in July 2021

Plenty of time for you to build your apocalypse survival shelters.

 

I noticed Humble Bundle has a CryEngine Asset Bundle going. I'm not sure if format and/or licensing allow for it, but if so, might be a cheap way to get some good assets (to be used with Gaia of course):

https://www.humblebundle.com/cryengine-bundle

Anyone have any insight into this?

 

Hey gang! My stamp packs for Gaia are finally live on the asset store!!! If you want some awesome village area stamps or volcano/mountain stamps, go check them out. Each volume is $5 and contains at least 10 stamps. Either tonight or tomorrow I will be submitting the Desert Area pack (another $5 volume) and a FREE sampler pack that contains the first stamp from pack volumes 1-4. Yup.. I said through 4. The April pack will be island stamps and stamp one from that pack is already in the sampler pack for you to try out.

My publisher page on the asset store is https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/page=1/sortby=popularity/query=publisher:15645

Thanks Adam for your support and presenting me with the opportunity to build these packs!

I can't wait to see the screenies everyone posts! And don't forget to submit support tickets at http://backwoodsgaming.com with your invoice numbers so I can reward you with purchase points for your purchases. Purchases here on the unity asset store are worth 2 points per dollar while purchases at my web store are worth 3 points per dollar. Points build up towards discounts/free pack offers in the future. I'll eventually have an app on the website that auto-registers the invoice and awards the points, but for now I'll be doing it manually. So don't panic when you submit a ticket and your points aren't instantly there!

Thanks in advance for all of your guys (and gals) support!

 

Would you be happy if we all just recreated new york with gaia and buildr etc? You'd save a load of effort as well

 

Young pup....

 

The plants and shrubs contain .max and .ma/.mb files alongside the textures. The trees contain .mb files. If I recall, .ma/.mb files are Maya?

re license - there's no license file contained in the download.

 

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Are you saying @Shawn67 is actually your name and age

 

heheh... nope.. but name and year I was born.. So a couple years older than @smada luap...

 

I suspected as much. I remember the commodore 64 and spectrum 48k coming out so I am not too far behind you both Great days. Pre public internet and home computers a new thing.

 

Yup.. Remember public internet and the first BBS apps starting to support them.. Think it was Wildcat and PCBoard that were the first. I ran one of the largest BBS systems in Columbus OH back in those days and was one of the Fidonet message board hubs for the area.. The good old days.. When 9600 bps was fast and 14.4kbps was lightnight fast. rofl

 

And now a single Gaia session file wouldn't fit into the RAM in those computers we remember so fondly

 

I remember groaning when I saw a new microsoft xp 20mb update. That took about 3/4 hour on a good 5k/s connection and it was pay per minute on the phone line.

 

I am always amazed at what they managed to do with those home computers. Some real skill.

 

Managing graphics and non-accelerated OpenGL required really tight C and Assembler programming.

 

Mind if I interrupt this trip down memory lane to share some pics? Most of what I've posted so far has been from a scene created before I got Gaia. I gave it a full Gaia makeover, but wasn't able to get too creative with it since I had to work around existing scene elements. Well, today I started work on a "new" scene, where I was free to do whatever I wanted with the terrain. It's set on a giant Ringworld, like the one featured in the books by Larry Niven. To give you an idea of the scale, the ring is a flat ribbon circling a star. It's 1.6 million kilometers wide, and over 300 million kilometers in diameter. Talk about an open world environment! My plans aren't that ambitious though, since I only plan to visit a very small part of it. Here's a quick taste:



The day/night cycle is provided by giant rectangular panels orbiting close to the sun. You can see the shadows they cast on the ring.

Proof that Gaia is capable of handling all of your terrestrial or extraterrestrial landscaping needs.

Resources used:

Gaia
Distingo
Various Speedtrees, some free, some bought
Turboscalpeur grasses (yes, you can use them in SPACE!)
Motion Controller
...plus my own custom Ringworld skybox​

I'm still looking for some decent alien plants, but Turboscalpeur's grasses are filling in nicely at the moment, with a few lighting and color tweaks.

 

Awesome! and GREAT work!

Thanks for pushing the train back onto the tracks and chugging through Gaia-land! heheh

 

Is there a way to show the sea level while editing terrain? I'm using Suimono ocean also.

 

Finely it is up.....But i brought it off your site.... hope you will keep your site/Downloads updated when you update the Asset store.

Nice work

 

Thanks! And yes, my web store will always have updates and new releases first. Not by plan, but just simply because I don't have to wait for someone else to do it. I will be adding a changelog to the product pages where you can see what has been updated and I hope to be able to get it setup to email you when a package you are registered for on the web store is updated. Also your purchases on the web store are good for 3 points per dollar spent whereas asset store customers get 2 points per dollar spent. Points may be turned down the road for discounts or even free packs. If you didn't opt out of the newsletter when you checked out, you will get monthly news regarding new packs, any specials deals (both sales/points offers), and update news.

For those who purchased on asset store, I don't have a regular newsletter signup on the site yet, but it is coming soon. If you want me to add you to the newsletter subscriber list, just PM me your email address and I'll manually add you.

Thanks again for your support! And btw, added Volume 3 which is a desert stamps pack to the store yesterday and also submitted to asset store. I'm also just wrapping up a free sampler pack that has the first stamp from the first four packs. (the first stamp from the 3 current packs as well as first stamp of the upcoming islands pack) which I'll be adding to web store as well as submitting to asset store tonight. So if you are on the fence about spending money on more stamps, grab the free one once it is available and let me get you hooked!

One last request. I totally appreciate those who have supported me so far, regardless of whether on asset store or web store. If I could beg you to go back to wherever you purchased and rate / review the packs, I would greatly appreciate it. Ratings and reviews are what help drive future sales. I'm currently disabled enough that I can't work out in a conventional job but not disabled enough that I've been given help (still fighting for it). This is a way to help me keep my head above water. So if you wouldn't mind dropping a review and rate to help show other potential customers what you think of the packs, it could be a HUGE help!

Again, thanks so much for the support!! And I can't wait to see screenies of the terrains you guys make with the stamps!

 

At this point I don't think there is a way to do this. I could see where it could be handy though. I wonder if this might be something that would be easy to add? I know with some water systems, if you change to ISO (or maybe the other way around) it will go more into a 3d view and show the water. But I dont think Suimono shows. One thing I've done in the past is drop a Water4 layer in from Unity's standard assets. Then before entering Play mode, I uncheck it in the inspector to disable it. That is one way to get around the lack of visual water in editor. I know @chingwa visits this thread from time to time. Maybe if there is a way to turn on display of Suimono in the editor, he can enlighten us.

 

Great idea!!! That'll help me texture the wet sand areas and create a better beach!!!

 

#tip You don't even need Water4. I don't use Suimono, but Ceto and a number of other water assets all have the same problem. I just drop a reference plane into my scene at sea level, put a blue/green semi-transparent material on it, and like @Shawn67 said, disable it before entering Play mode. Better yet, just put it on a non-renderable layer.

 

The free terrain stamps for gaia sampler pack I talked about above is now available on my web store at http://assets.backwoodsgaming.com/product/terrains-stamps-for-gaia-sampler-pack/

It was also submitted to the asset store for approval tonight.

 

Demo day at GDC was pretty cool today. Lots of interest in Gaia, and made some awesome connections

 

Suimono does show in edit mode (though the reflections are not accurate to what you see in-game) but the real issue is that when it's set to infinite ocean mode it doesn't enlarge to the edge until you press play. However you can click on the Suimono object and enlarge the x/z scale in edit mode however large you need it for your scene, and it should automatically set itself correctly once you press play.

 

Hey guys, I just bought gaia and out of the box its pretty amazing. The first thing i noticed though is speed tree is quite expensive. I seems that only the billboards batch and then only sometimes. I was wondering if you guys had any tips, about how i could get some better performance. I did a few tests with mesh baker, and just compared about 300 trees with just lod0 and then, them baked them into one mesh, the performance was good as a single mesh but you lose alot of variation and they dont look quite as good.

here is just the lod0 trees:

and here is them all baked into one mesh:

 

With speedtrees I do two things for performance.. First, in my prefab I delete all the colliders except the main trunk. Most speedtrees have a lot of colliders and that slows down performance. Unless you are flying, the only one you really need is the trunk. If you are going to be flying, you can delete all the individual leaf group colliders and just make one leaf group collider thank encompasses most of the upper trees leaf area.

The second thing I do is use @ElroyUnity's Trees Manager System asset. It seems to do a much better job with dealing with the culling of trees which are out of range from the player than the base LOD system. Plus as an added bonus, it lets you interact with trees (even if they are spawned as terrain trees) so you can set them to be choppable.

 

Has anyone had a problem with splatmaps not updating when running coverage texture spawner after the first time? I don't remember having this issue before, but I just started reworking my terrain from stratch with the newest gaia version and for some reason my splatmap won't update at all after spawning, no matter what I change in the rules.

Also, a potential bug I've noticed - when I change the sea level in the resources file, I have to delete all of the spawners and recreate them. Otherwise, it just goes right back to the previous value the second that I click on the visualizer.

 

@Shawn67 : thanks man. Any other performance must haves you can point me toward.

 

I can think of anything specifically offhand. Adam and some others posted some performance tips a page or two back in the thread. I think they may have been talking about mobile, but it all applies. I haven't worked on my game in quite some time as I've been helping test Gaia and a few other assets and then the past couple of months I've been working on my stamp packs for Gaia, which have now started popping into the asset store and are also available on my web store (links in signature).. So my performance stuff has mainly just being odds and ends stuff so I can move on my crappy computer and not really for game environment going into production. You can go back through the last 3-4 pages and you will find their posts. Or you can really just look at any search results on tuning scene performance for Unity 5. Gaia uses standard unity terrain. Once you stamp and spawn, you can completely strip Gaia out and everything should still work the same as when Gaia is installed into your project. So any performance tuning for trees, grasses, gameobjects, etc should work the same with Gaia as it would without Gaia and vice versa.

Good luck! Can't wait to see some screenshots of what you put together!!

 

I read in another thread that Unity 5.4's new batching could boosts SpeedTree performance a bunch.

 

Wow, you were not kidding about tree manager.

 

how are the stats without the manager?

 

K, I got 1 set of 20 game objects to spawn in a corner of my 75x75 terrain which is
at height 0, you can see the rules I applied mainly, ignore everything but height 0,
however, I have a 2nd and 3rd GO type with same rules that isn't spawning anywhere, in fact one of them doesn't appear in GO spawner even though it's in
my resources. It's OK if they spawn in a corner, I can move them but the no shows are a problem.

 

The draw calls are essentially the same, but i think the performance boost comes in the fact that you dont have all the colliders, and also the lod changes seem way smoother and less hitchy.

 

Looking at your barrels image, you don't have any fitness checks selected. You have to click a check box in order to turn fitness checks on. All of yours in that image are unchecked. I'm not sure how Gaia is coded to run if NONE are selected. But my guess is, that may be why it isn't spawning any of them. The other question is, what is your sea level set to. If your sea level isn't set to 0, then Gaia thinks you terrain is underwater if the terrain has a Y of 0. 0 height in Gaia's spawners actually interprets as your sea level in Y axis. So if your sea level is 50 (I think Gaia's default setting) then you would need your terrain object's Y to be 50 to spawn anything from 0 through ( terrain height - sea level ). Having it this way allows games that have underwater content to be able to spawn coral, underwater plants, wreckage, etc from a gaia height of -1 to ( 0 - sea level ).

As far as the other image, no clue why the stones aren't spawning too. Hard to tell without seeing what that original game object looks like when manually put into the terrain. Have you tried zooming in? I wonder if it is some kind of LOD problem maybe? Not sure.

 

Test 1 (Pretty much just out of the box)

 

Thanks! Was quite curious! Glad to hear

I've been looking for information on that also. I saw it, and thought it might be great to use with Gaia. Though it seems that it would take some effort to do so. Here's the licensing information I found for some of the assets...

http://pastebin.com/Jc4YAeGt

So it seems that for those specific assets, you're allowed to use them outside of CryEngine. The others seem to be bound to CryEngine.