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

Kia ora

@Adam,.. I remember (I think) you saying you make your textures PSD files with the spec in the alpha, I'm getting a weird haze/shiny effect and after looking my normals have a white alpha channel, I'm thinking this should taken out and the normal should have no alpha, or am I going the wrong way for Unity, should I have the grey spec in the normal alpha channel and no alpha in the diffuse? My textures are 2048x2048 BTW if that makes a difference

 

*this web page* wouldn't fit in the RAM of those computers ;-)

 

Were you *bounce* a counterstrike *bounce* player *bounce* at some point?

 

Damn, that is very nice and nice FPS as well

 

I'm getting tables and chairs but not on the terrain. You can try it out yourself,

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/102638093/dungeon_piiichan.unitypackage
8MB

all assets are public domain.

 

here's a pic

 

try setting some spawn criteria.. I'm in middle of rebuilding my game dev machine because of HD issues.. getting ready to swap out drive and reload/restore, so unable to test your scene. Maybe someone else can take a look. But you don't have any of the spawn criteria turned on in the image you posted. I really think that is probably part of your problem. But again, without being able to test atm, I can't really say for sure.

 

Hi, has any one had a problem with the cluster spawning? I've tried several attempts but the plants and rocks are being spawned individually. I've double checked the settings and really can't see what the problem is, and never had this problem before. Any idea what the problem could be? Thanks

 

I have a 8 tiled terrain, can I use any trick to make gaia works with my 8 tiled terrain?

 

So I have been messing around with Gaia (when am I not?). Still doing my learning process. This was just me making a cool area. Wanted to do mesas. Set up my own spawners for textures, trees, details. No object spawning yet.

Made my own cliff texture (fairly quickly) and bitmap2material'd it for the other maps.

Tenkoku, Distingo+VTP terrain stuff, and a few of Backwoods desert stamps.






Really just goofing around and experimenting. Not something I ever plan to release but comments are of course welcome for my own future learning. =)

 

@Wizard Games - You had asked about performance the other day. I was just looking for something else and ran across @Damien Delmarle's post. He was responding about mobile, but a lot of the same things apply to other platforms as well. Larger platforms you can get away with showing more, but these same things can help you tune. Just tweak until you are satisfied.

 

@Wizard Games - Here is the other post I was thinking of... Found both of these posts and still haven't found the ones I was trying to find for me.... rofl.. This thread is starting to get like the 3DForge packs.. You need Artie and Claudia to guide you through.. (for the Warehouse 13 fans... for those of you who didn't watch the show, it means the thread, like Cobus' packs, are huge as... well.. I'll keep it clean... they are just huge... lol)

 

I thought I had already posted more of my images of the terrains I made with the stamp packs I've put out so far. While Adam was waiting to board his plane home from GDC, he told the beta group to make sure we are sharing screens so people can see what we are doing. That was why I scrolled all the way back through several pages of the thread. I was trying to see what I had already posted but could only find one image shared. I know I did more, but after looking at 6 or 7 pages, my brain is turning to mush. So I apologize in advance for any duplicates. If you want to see more of the screenshots, I recommend you take a look at my website. The Unity Asset Store has some of the images, but only two of the three packs are approved there and they only have a very small sampling of the images. Right now images are in three places. The asset store is one, but those images are also on my web store. In addition to the asset store and web store, you can also click the first link at the top of the detail description (longer description on main tab below the frequently bought together images) on the web store product page. This will take you to the original product pages I setup prior to getting the web store running. As soon as I can make enough money, I will be picking up an asset that will let me do multiple custom tabs (the demo only lets me do one custom tab) and I will be adding each of the header areas from that original product page, along with a version change log, to the web store product pages to consolidate them.

At any rate, here are a couple of the images of terrains created with the stamp packs. In most of them I also used Distingo, Time of Day, AQUAS (if there was water), and all the trees/grasses/ground textures/buildings were from the sampler assets that publishers provided to Adam so he could include with Gaia. The only exception is the desert terrains which used either Middle East Environment Pack from Manufactura K4 or Big Environment Pack 3 from Philipp Schmidt. If you look at the product info pages on my website, I have links to all of them.

Each of the images I put together for the stamp packs is done with a single stamp from the pack. Images which have been posted by others really showcase what you can do by taking the stamps and artistically combining them with other stamps. I wanted these to showcase that you can get great results both ways.

Actually going to go ahead and put the links to packs in various spots as well as information on the packs below. (Probably should put in first post of my thread too.. lol)

General Pack Information
Stamp Packs Overview - General information about Backwoods Gaming stamp packs
Documentation - General stamp pack documentation
Stamp Pack Quick Start Guide - Step by step guide on importing and preparing stamp packs for use
Stamp Pack Quick Start Video - Same as above except in video form [coming soon - I hope]

Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Vol 1 - Village Areas
Detailed Pack Info | On Backwoods Gaming Store | On Unity Asset Store


Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Vol 2 - Mountain and Volcano
Detailed Pack Info | On Backwoods Gaming Store | On Unity Asset Store
(I know I've shared this image in a few places before, but it is by far my favorite from this pack (if not all of them.. lol)


Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Vol 3 - Desert Area
Detailed Pack Info | On Backwoods Gaming Store | Unity Asset Store [Submitted Mar 15]


Terrain Stamp Packs for Gaia Sampler
The next stamp is available in the FREE Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Sampler Pack. It is also the first stamp in the upcoming Terrain Stamps Pack for Gaia Vol 4 - Islands, which I hope will be live on my web store and submitted to asset store during the weekend of April 2nd. The sampler pack includes the first stamp in each of the first four volumes and should be enough of a taste to let you know what the stamp packs are like.
Detailed Pack Info | On Backwoods Gaming Store | Unity Asset Store [Submitted March 16th]


Enjoy! If you like what you see, pick up the packs at either asset store or my web store. Web store purchases earn 3 loyalty points per dollar spent. If you purchase on the asset store, open a support ticket on my web store and give me your invoice number for verification and I will credit your web store account with 2 loyalty points per dollar spent. Loyalty points will eventually be used for discounts, bundling options, and maybe even sales where they can be exchanged for a pack! Also, be sure to sign up for my newsletter while on the site to keep up to date.

At any rate, these images were each stamped, spawned, and explored within an hour using default spawners. Keep in mind, when I'm stamping and testing I have anywhere from 15-20 stamps I've worked up to test and select from to make a pack of 10. No way I could do the packs if it took me longer. And if you look at the pictures, while they may not be ready for your game, imagine if you put a day or two into each one to really tweak things out.. Adding things like the volumetric fog pack that was just on sale, explore different day/night and/or weather systems/settings, really tweaking the light to get it better, adding a wider variety of trees, buildings, villages. Imagine the possibilities!

Before Gaia, I tried to create terrains like this and spent weeks on them just trying to get a heightmap that I was satisfied with. I dreaded working on terrains. Now I have problems getting myself to work on anything else... rofl..

Hope you enjoy and look forward to seeing what you guys are creating with Gaia! Oh, and if you happen to buy my stamps, don't forget to share in my thread too! (link in my signature... )

 

Doing a lot of experimenting with Gaia and getting great results.

@AdamGoodrich: While taking screenshots with Gaia's built in Screen Shotter I noticed that changing to the PNG format doesn't actually change the image format, only the file extension. Irfanview says that the saved screenshot is a JPG-file with wrong extension. Is this a known issue?

Using Gaia 1.5.3
Windows 10 pro
Windows stand-alone build

 

Made another new texture. Probably needs more tweaking. Same map and other addons as last post.

 

how do you make your own textures? using gametextures.com as basis?
then B2M?

 

Actually this was a stock / source texture from "textures.com". I mainly just had to clean up the seams with it. I also have another version that's a bit more faded from attempting to make it into a proper albedo. Something I am practicing with (diffuse to albedo via photoshop).

For the rest of the maps (rough, normal, ao, etc) I used Bitmap2Material. Tweaking mainly the normal map.

 

I use textures.com as well, I love the fact you can test out different textures for free and still have the option to upgrade to a higher resolution at a later date. I find that the textures with the smallest details / furthest zoomed out work best since they don't have much tiling. Normally I can manage a UV of 3 or even 2, compared with 4 or 5 using the GameTextures samples.

 

Yeah, I just bought a sub there for a year. =)

 

Bought the asset. Followed the tutorial, clicked 'generate' and got this.

Dang.

I'm using the free extended fog effect I found on the forum, plus the depth of field and tonemapper from the Unity 5.3 preview pack. It almost feels like I have to make a game in this environment now to pay it proper respects...

 

I've selected 8 textures instead of 4 and after building spawner this is what it's looks like!

 

Apologies if this has been discussed before - having trouble keeping up with this thread.

Finally got some time to try Gaia 1.5.3 - just followed Adams quick start guide. The result looks good as a start but my fps is sucking at about 15. I already know this has nothing do with gaia per se but even just looking down at the ground doesn't help

i have a 6 core Amd 2.7Ghz with a GTX760 and regularly play games with larger and more detailed terrains with much better frame rates. Since I plan on adding more detail and effects i can only see the fps dropping even further. I see a lot of other really nice terrains been shown and videos of people zipping through them.

Not sure where to start looking ...

[Added] Using Unity 5.3.4f1 - even Unity interface is supper sluggish when the play button invoked, checked my system cpu usually staying below 50%, I turned off all the camera effects but still have issues - found this under the profiler - https://gyazo.com/9568c5a3a88faa269b2438fc34020c2d

Terrain.Details.BuildPatchMesh?

[Identified:] Water Planar Reflection script. Disable it and I get normal fps.

Note to self: I wonder if All the time I will now spend looking at asset store lists will obliterate all the time savings of said packages

 

HAHA, great comment
" It almost feels like I have to make a game in this environment now to pay it proper respects... "

 

@MarcusWatson: lol, i was channeling tigger.

@Shawn67 : thanks those are some good tips.

 

@Shawn67, meet Artie and Claudia: Gaia Thread Search Template

This was posted here a while back by @chaneya from Permafrost Gaming, but due to the speed this thread flies by, you may have missed it. Very useful. Just save the link above as a bookmark, and finding things in this thread will become an order of magnitude easier. I just used it now to find the original post about it, so I could properly credit the author.

 

lol... if you look way back before they posted it, I had posted it too.. (Nov 10th) I thought I had posted it twice, but not seeing it in a quick search. My problem was I was looking for images and I thought it was just a page or two back but by the time I stopped, I'd already gone back 6 or 7 pages... heheh I guess I could have searched using my user name in the thread to have made it easier. I still find it a little asinine that Unity hasn't made/activated the link for it to make searching easier. lol

 

I can't take full credit, just found and quoted the other folks Hope they work out for ya though..

 

I guess I missed that because I hadn't even heard of Gaia then. Wow, this thread was only 39 pages long then as well! I did credit the first post I saw on the subject, but didn't take the search back any further, or I'd have seen you already knew this trick. But yes, it's not so useful at finding pictures.

 

heheh... No worries. I found a post about it shortly after they updated for forum software when the function had disappeared. At any rate, wasn't really seeking credit. Was just pointing out that I knew about it.. heheh As huge as the thread has grown, probably a good thing for folks to share every 10 pages or so.. lol

 

@ibyte: Water Planar Reflection script has locked my camera script up before. It doesn't happen all the time, so I haven't figured out what I do to cause that script to fail sometimes.

 

Alright. I think I am done with my Mesa / Desert stuff.
Gaia
Tenkoku
Aquas
Backwoods Gaming desert stamps (mainly the flat areas in this)
Distingo + VTP 1.2 Beta (Triplanar mapping and near / far UV are the big ones with a bit of height blending)

All terrain textures are from source images I edited, and passed through bitmap 2 material for the other maps.

 

WOW,
I am definitely getting the desert stamps pack when they out on the Asset Store.
Excellent work here using all these assets

 

Pretty sure I saw them the other day. Just sort by released last few days.

 

I am following this thread for so long, so I thought to post also some screens of my little test with Gaia and RTP. I finally found some time to play with both so here are some Screens with and without Snow / Frost effect.






Textures, RTP Options and Speed Trees are just for testing purpose. I still need to buy some Speedtrees and well Time / Day Effects also.
Open point also is to get a full density of the grass on textures like in Adams or turboscalpeur screenshot. Played with Location Increment (actual 0.5) and Max Jitter Percent (actual 1) and still there is to much space between the grasses left. The screenshot are not good for an example because they are made on a hill without much grass. Perhaps someone could share his density options to get a more natural "full" grass look.

 

Desert ones are still pending review but are available in my web store if you want them now. Keep in mind, as @wolfen231 stated, the desert stamp is shown in the flatter areas of his terrain. It looks like he then stamped a bunch of mesas for additional features. (correct me if I'm wrong wolfen).. Don't get me wrong, I want people to buy the stamps. I just want to make sure people don't buy them expecting to get a terrain that looks exactly like Wolfen's photos with one stamp. This is the beauty of Gaia. Use a stamp as a base and then apply other features with other stamps to get exactly what you are looking for!

 

Quick - clueless noob - question, what exactly does VTP do that improves on gaia and the distingo shaders?

 

I started with your stamp as a base. Stamped some mesa's, then used a couple more of your stamps to define a couple more of the open spaces.

The mesas all came with Gaia I believe.

 

If you own both Distingo will have some shaders for use that allow you to do height blending of layers and a couple of other things.

The very same question is answered over at the forum for the combo http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wi...uality-terrain-rendering.391816/#post-2560143

 

Kia ora

I'm still trying to figure this out, sorry bout the repost but do need to sort it.

I remember Adam saying he made his textures PSD files with the spec in the alpha. I'm getting a weird haze/shiny effect and after looking my normals have a white alpha channel, I'm thinking this should taken out and the normal should have no alpha, or am I going the wrong way for Unity, should I have the grey spec in the normal alpha channel and no alpha in the diffuse? My textures are 16bit 2048x2048 PSD's files the normals are 16bit TGA's if that makes a difference

 

Sounds like a specular setting in the shader you're using needs a tweak. Either that or it's that they're 16bit and there's too much data - most graphics that I'm aware of are only 8bit for display purposes

 

Kia ora

It just came to me a nice feature would be a type of cloning tool. Say for example you needed a specific land shape
to place a village. (Maybe one from a test project you like and didn't want to have to rebuild all over again) If you had
a mesh of that part of the terrain to put in place then use this tool to scroll over the mesh pulling the terrain to the shape of the mesh and give you the same shape, the mesh would be a mold to shape that part of the terrain to. It could then be removed allowing you to select the whole village in your test scene copy and past it neatly in place one that nicely created part of the terrain with very little tweaking, therefor saving a ton of rebuild time

 

Thanks for the reply I'm going to look at redoing my textures, it seems the open source freeware textures I got for Skyrim modding are way to higher rez for Unity

 

This is beautiful, any chance you could tell me how you did this? I have worked with Maya and 3DsMax, but still getting to know Unity3D. Do we really need that desert pack? I believe its $75.

 

The desert stamps pack @wolfen231 is using isn't on the asset store yet. It was submitted on the 15th. It is only $5 for a pack of 11 terrain stamps. All you have to do with them is use the Gaia extension to enable the stamps and they will show up with all your other Gaia stamps. You don't need to know Maya or 3DsMax to use them. Install, enable, and BAM - use with Gaia!

The reason @wolfen231 has them already is they are already available on my web store at https://assets.backwoodsgaming.com. Hopefully the islands pack will be up and available there at some point between Sunday and the following weekend. It will also be a $5 pack.

I think you are probably thinking of the environment packs from people like Manufactura K4 or Big Environment Packs that actually have models, textures, plants, etc. The stamp packs just contain Gaia terrain stamp collections.

If you would like to try out the stamps, there is a free sampler pack available on my web store now too. It has also been submitted to the asset store, but on the 16th. So both packs are still pretty early in the asset store review process.

 

I hope you have a Zip or share how exactly you did it.

 

First guess is it was object spawned and they tweaked the values for where it could spawn. Object spawners check for collisions. So I can see that working hehe.

 

Hi everyone, back from GDC, and starting to get on top of the Jetlag. Apologies for the relative radio silence while I was away. It was full on and awesome. Hardly had time to scratch myself it was so busy.

I have confirmed this is a bug. Its now fixed and fix will be in the next release.

Yep the spec is in the alpha channel of the PSD. I tried various other methods to add this into other image formats using photoshop, but kept on losing the alpha channel and in the end left it as a PSD file as Unity has no problems reading it. Not sure what you are doing wrong, and I am not expert enough on other tools to be able to suggest a better way to do it. You can look at the files I have supplied for a sample of how this should look.

Hard to say - it works fine for me, and if it isn't then its most likely a configuration issue. Feel free to PM me if you would like me to check your setup.

High res textures in Unity are easily handled. Go and drop their resolution and compression on each individual textures settings in Unity.

Set your animals up as prefabs. Get Gaia to spawn your prefabs as GameObject. I have done this before with Emerald Ai and it works just fine. Btw i like to uses a clustered spawner as this places the animals in the same area.

 

Kia ora

Could this be why the Coverage Spawner stops at 32.6 percent

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Gaia.Spawner+<RunAreaSpawnerIteration>c__IteratorD.MoveNext () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SpawningSystem/Spawner.cs:1370)
Gaia.Spawner.EditorUpdate () (at Assets/Gaia/Scripts/SpawningSystem/Spawner.cs:441)
UnityEditor.EditorApplication.Internal_CallUpdateFunctions () (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/generated/common/editor/EditorApplicationBindings.gen.cs:217)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

@Adam I found my normals had a white alpha, so I deleted all the alphas out of the normals, now I just need get the coverage to finish to see if that helps, if not I have to start over

 

It obeys instance count. Get the latest version of Gaia.

 

No, I got that, thanks, just wondered about the nice image texture he created for the mesas. Have not made any materials yet, but have done so in Maya and 3dsMax.