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

The approach you have listed at the end of your post is the approach I use. Basically use Gaia for all the spawner "heavy lifting" so to speak. Let Gaia do the bulk of the work and then go tweak the spawns to fit your needs or to adjust them for the way you want your scene to look.

Depending on which spawners you are running, most will just add additional spawns into your scene if you run them multiple times. Texture spawners are the only ones that I think aren't really additive.. But generally running tree spawners a second time will spawn more trees, GameObject spawners will spawn more game objects. Etc. But yeah, painting ground textures and then running the texture spawner will definitely lose any painting you did.

You briefly touched on another option which Adam has referred to as biomes. You can spawn areas within a terrain by decreasing the size of the spawner area to fit the area you want to spawn. That is another option if you want to go back and spawn later having the spawners only effect that smaller area. This is useful if you want to add a swampy area or an old decrepit cemetery where all of the stuff you are spawning is vastly different. It won't effect any hand painting of textures you have done outside that area, but any within it would be replaced when you run a texture spawner for the area.

In general, I think any roads, paths, detailed ground texturing you would want to do in a Gaia workflow would definitely be saved to the very end.

Hope that helps.

 

Thanks! I also remembered about masks. But while custom masks and texture masks is an option, I really want to know the approach that most people are using when working with real game levels.

 

#tip Not really sure that making performance assessments on beta software is useful. It's a moving target, and I am pretty sure that there are still things they haven't introduced yet - for example gpu instancing on speedtrees.

What you are trying to do is balance your available CPU and GPU resources against what you are throwing at them. The more you throw at it, then the harder it has to work, and the less performance you get. So less really is more - from a performance perspective.

There are many potential causes of performance issues and many ways to mitigate them. You should profile your game and work out where the bottleneck are.

Here are a couple of things to consider:

* Camera far clipping plane - the further you view - the more work the system has to do

* Terrain triangle. Explore pixel error. Also run a smooth on it before doing anything - this will often significantly reduce polys - which all adds up.

* Too many SpeedTrees:
- Experiment with LOD's
- Remove colliders - Elroy's system ensures that only the closest trees have colliders
- or be more creative with your level design and introduce terrain features that occlude trees.

* Too many terrain textures
- A standard terrain 'pass' can paint 4 textures. Every addition 4 textures in your terrain means another terrain pass is required to render them. This means more work for the system to do and less performance. Some non standard terrain shaders get more textures per pass. I can't comment about performance differences though as I have focussed on supporting what unity gives you to work with.

* Too much grass
- Less grass textures - same as previous point on terrain textures - more grass textures = more work for Unity to render it
- Less detail density - less work
- Less detail distance - less work

* Post FX and other non standard shaders
- Turn them all off, re introduce with the profiler to asses impact. Tweak settings. I have liked what I have seen of the new Cinema FX so far despite it being in beta still.

* Unity water
- Don't use it. There are several 3rd party water systems that have much better performance. The issue here is reflections - reflecting lots of vegetation is expensive. There is a trick you can use to only reflect terrain but it is messy to set up.

* Lod BIAS
- In quality settings experiment with your LOD bias

Use the profiler - what is actually causing the issues? Turn on deep profiling to get more information. What about texture sizes etc. Also, pay attention to what people are saying about batch count's and setpass calls. Is your game exceeding these.

I am also exploring performance in Unity. My approach is to look at one thing, profile it, experiment to optimise, and then add on the next etc. For example by doing this I noticed in the profiler that running several smooths on a terrain reduced the number of triangles that needed to be rendered - and I was happy that the smoothed terrain still looked nice.

 

Thanks. I missed that.

 

#tip Environmental lighting performance... I found the following snippet here.

Fast Environment Lighting
The realtime GI system is capable of using a skybox directly to drive the environment lighting inputs. However, using this feature requires downloading the skybox textures from the GPU in order to update the CPU based realtime GI system. This is not ideal when the environment lighting changes every frame as it does in this demo when the time-of-day simulation is running. Instead, the environment lighting is derived from the current time and converted to a lighting gradient and ambient intensity that is used to drive the realtime GI system. These are the settings in the Lighting panel that are used to drive the gradient based ambient inputs:



A gradient ambient source can be handled entirely on the CPU. This is very performant and gives a result that is nearly indistinguishable from using the full skybox.

There is also as simple time of day script there that provides a simple time of day system.

 

Thanks heaps for this Adam!

 

I've purchased gaia, how can I create a terrain 4096x4096 for example?
thanks!

 

#tip You can set the size, along with a few other things like terrain height, resolution, and sea level, in the GaiaDefaults file, located in the Gaia/Data folder. But if you just got it, you should spend some time reading the manual, located in Gaia/Documentation, or at least check out some of Adam's introductory videos, found here, before going much further. Gaia may be fairly simple to use, but you still need to be aware of a few key concepts, and the documentation and tutorials are a great place to start.

 

thanks!
i've read but not found the gaiadefaults

 

I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but I saw this asset on the store today that could certainly be beneficial to anyone concerned with terrains. The tool allows you to change your terrain resolution settings without losing data. It even works with multiple terrain tiles. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks fantastic. I certainly plan to add it to my bag of tricks.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/28949

 

I've had it on my wishlist for a while. If anyone has tried it, I would love to hear how it worked out for you. I agree, IF it works it would be a must have in everyone's terrain toolbox.

 

If you've followed the directions in the tutorials, GaiaDefaults file you are using is defined in Gaia Manager. If you simply click on it there, it will highlight the correct GaiaDefaults file in your Project view.

 

I've tried Unity 4.6, 5.1, 5.3, and I keep getting the import error "Failed to import package with error: Couldn't decompress package UnityEditor.Web.JSProxyMgroTasks()...
This is the only asset I have this issue with, so I'm hoping it can be fixed at your end or by Unity... any suggestions will be grateful...

 

I have no control over this - its a Unity thing.

Most likely the disk where the package is downloaded by unity is full. Delete some space and try again.

Alternatively perhaps the package was corrupted on download. Delete the version of Gaia that was downloaded from your download cache and download it again. The folder you are looking for is the asset store download location.

 

Apologies if ive missed anything on this topic in the 113 pages but I was wondering if anyone had a setup for VR development? Certain things likes trees etc do not work well in VR, the frame rate just drops crazy. With the new sessions system, I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this and was able to supply a sample session for getting started in VR dev. Right now im using quite a basic terrain with just a few spawned game objects and textured grounds. The biggest issue is that the lighting is not great and flickers all around the scene.

I know some of this is probably off topic here, but any guidance is greatly appreciated!

 

This may have been asked, but is it possible to remove trees/grass/other Gaia-placed objects during runtime via scripting?

 

No.

#tip I have been exploring VR and mobile development. Gaia has a mesh export feature that exports highly compressed meshes. You can also swap the sample assets for low poly assets.

The workflow is something like:

Create terrain as usual with Gaia - make smaller terrains or use tools like world streamer to cut up.
Spawn your textures.
Set up and spawn low poly assets into scene with Gaia.
Export splat maps and terrain mesh - choose the smallest setting on mesh export.
Remove terrain and replace with exporter
Use distingo or spat2terrain and apply terrain textures to your mesh with the exported splatmaps.

As with any mobile / vr development. Drop texture sizes down, and bake everything.

 

Superb, thank you for the tip! This is going to be a great help going forward! Now to dive into Gaia a bit more I think

 

Have you considered crowd funding like Kick Starter or a Patreon to do Gaia fulltime?
We'd contribute a generous amount to something like that.

Just a suggestion.

 

Time for more sneak peeks:

 

Really nice! I like the graphic style and the hue you've chosen there. Just goes to show you can get really nice scenes without using SpeedTrees.

 

Great done! i feel some hard works behind those screens and mostly, i love where you have gone within' to get that kind of realism

 

@Xenonus,

Those are great shots. Any chance of sharing what assets you used? In particular the lighting.

Thanks

 

Hi there i am planing GAIA for mobile terrains
Just wanted to check What would i need to do to get the GAIA terrains with good performance.

 

The thing to know first off is that Gaia is simply a tool to help you generate your terrains and fill them with trees, grass, rocks, and other props. At the core, it isn't anything but a tool to interface to the existing Unity terrain system. So, performance optimization begins and ends with what you can do to optimize the Unity terrain system.

The biggest things to consider are terrain size, terrain heightmap resolution, texture resolution, detail resolution, and the kinds of trees and other assets you are placing on the terrain itself. Shadowing is also a big deal and should be reduced in quality as well as distance. I'd go as low as 129 on heightmap resolution for starters. You can still get nice terrain and it'll take a lot less memory or cpu. There are other posts in this thread that talk about other things you can do.

 

In addition to what magique said also make sure you turn Global illumination off realtime and also consider using more basic shaders.

 

I have been messing around with Gaia. Though it's an awesome tool, my question is: Would it be possible to create a planet using this tool? Perhaps maybe I can use this tool on a sphere instead of a plane? Or would it be possible to make the plane terrain I create into a sphere?

 

Hi dtran,

Don't know if anyone has managed to use gaia on anything other than a standard terrain but don't expect them to have. I'd ask what do you plan to do. If you have a flight/space sim and are just passing over vast areas quickly then I wouldn't use gaia or any other similar solution. If you want a planet made up of detailed landscapes that you will be exploring at ground level then that sounds unfeasible for anything less than a massive dev team. And even then it would probably use every trick known to man to produce. Sounds fun till you embark on making it. It would be fun to play though

 

Simple hq skybox was used with a bit tweaked directional light and global fog. The open sourced volumetric light asset gives a much better result, but the unity trees and speedtrees are broken in deferred... And indeed unity trees are less performance consuming and can have a really nice look.
Furthermore Scion gives the instant pretty alongside RTP and AFS.
And of course Turbo's vol 1 grasses were used.

 

It's saturday! Warmed up Gaia and I've made some screenshots in a mountain scene trying to keep a clear look. Bivouac is prohibited.









Used the following assets:

• Gaia
• HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol 1 & 2
• SpeedTree Hero Tree Package 1 & 2
• Time of Day
• HBAO
• Beautify
• Cinematic Image Effects

 

I can just say WOW !!!
Spectacular

 

New demo 209 MB, for some reason 'global fog' on the camera strips off all my trees' leaves, didn't add much
fps so I removed it. Switched to 'forward' rendering from 'deferred' because window/lighting 'check fog' was only
fogging the trees.
https://sites.google.com/site/terrymorgan1213/tutorials/bogwood_may_2016

 

Thanks for the reply. Sounds like skill on your part as well as you have got them working well together. A lot of people seem to like Scion. I don't have it but haven't seen a bad word about it..

 

Really nice pics. There's a lot of foliage there. I may be wrong but I reckon it won't be too long before hardware is up to spec to throw scenes like that around. Out of interest did you test out framerate?

If you haven't already tried it I recommend Tree manager system. Elroy the dev must be a time traveling space programmer as I have know idea how he manages to get another 100 fps out of systems.

 

Well, it's not as bad as I tought it could be... However my GPU is not bad (MSI GTX 760 Twin Frozr OC 2GB).



The scene isn't optimized at all, the trees are all "Hero" SpeeTrees (hence the high polycount) and I've just baked Occlusion Culling, GI is purely realtime. The grass is quite dense and its distance is at 250.

With Elroy's uNature should be great!

 

Really good stats. Nicely surprised. Occlusion culling is something rarely mentioned. Will have to look into it. Very nice

 

Just made a quick gaia landscape and without occlusion culling it was approx 10 fps faster!? Mind bending.

Same scenes and everything.

 

That's curious. I wonder what's behind that?

 

10 fps means nothing without a clear comparison. I have to admit I haven't tested the perfs without it however it is expected that Umbra will take some CPU time, 10 fps on how much max fps ?

 

Occlusion culling is not suitable for big outdoor environments. It takes longer to calculate what needs to be occluded than to just render it. You need to use other techniques to gain performance such as viewing distance, LOD, streaming, etc.

 

Thanks everyone for the replies. It was a surprise. I bought Sectr about 2 years ago on great sale so I will be looking at that when I do my next game.

@magique, interesting to know. Thanks.

 

hi all!
I have a question about the terrain/gaia..
I'm making a rally simulator and in my mind I wish use gaia to build the terrains where, in a second time I build the road... I made some tests and it works fine, but now my problem is the size of the terrain...
with 2048 everything is fine and fast, but is too small for my needs...
so I've tried to build a terrain 8192, but is too much expensive and the spawn etc makes too much time..
did you have some ideas?
I think a thing that the terrain is 8192 and more, but the part spawned by trees etc is only a small part... it's possible?
thanks in advance

 

One thing that crossed my mind today for better performance is you could make sure that all the assets close to the player are best quality and the rest lower quality as they will never get near it. Like an extreme LOD. You could also use natural features as walls and have tracks that double back a lot giving a long circuit but only covering a smaller footprint so you can reduce the map size.

 

As suggested by @magique a few posts above, for such a terrain size it's better to stream it.

 

Hi, I saw on the website it's written there is a work around for multi terrain. What is it, can you explain?

 

About mobile optimisations:

one very simple and easy optimisation for mobile:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. public int m_CloseObjectCulDistance = 85; //use this layer on small rocks/bushes/etc
3. public int m_FarObjectCulDistance = 300; //use this on props that are >2 metter high
4.  
5.     void SetCameraCulling()
6.     {
7.         var distances = new float[32];
8.         distances[29] = m_CloseObjectCulDistance;
9.         distances[28] = m_FarObjectCulDistance;
10.         Camera.main.layerCullDistances = distances;
11.     }

I also use Sectr on my scene and i use a different workflow than Shawn. it still very early WIP, but the result are very good on when i deploy on my ipad
to me splitting the terrain is not simple to work on it with gaia for later. So I make 1024x1024 terrains tiles and connect them using some passages/tunnel/any way to make occluded small corridors. Each terrain become one large streamed sector, without resource overhead when player loader is far.

Transition to the next zone:

so i can texture and spawn grass/trees on the whole terrain tile and keep very good performances as unity terrain do a lot of optimisation on this side.
then for all the rocks bushes house and other props i'm using nested sector of different sizes, when i want to spawn object in one sector:

• i set the gaia spawner range to be same size as my sector
• spawn the objects
• drag the objects from the spawner and reparent them in my sector

Sectors layout:


i also created some group of object with a LODgroup on the root, i set them as small cluster, lod 0 display vegetation,lod 1 bigger props. so in general my scene have 10~20 LOD group depending on amount of sectr loaded, this save some performance too.

LOD setup on a cluster of object:

then i'm switching terrain shader to legacy diffuse, set pixel error from 1 to 14 after baking textures and spawning grass.
the game stats are from 10k to 40k poly and around 15 drawcalls

 

Awesome post!!

I really don't understand your comment. Time compared to what? Doing an 8km x 8km terrain by hand to the level of detail that Gaia does it is weeks or even months of work for an environmental artist / level designer - at a cost of ?$ per hour. Even if you have to wait for an hour - which you don't - that's a drop in the ocean comparatively.

 

Some support for those whose are lost by spawning Grass in Gaia:

I built a kind of "wet" Scene with mostly Grasses which are growing up near or on water areas.

I mixed those Grass with Billboards ticked or not. Mostly the Grasses Billboards are the Coverage ones or the higher ones, but that's not a definition; you can settle on your own tastes.

All the Grass on that Scene are exclusively coming from the HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol.2 (even if some Textures will be available only on the coming update).

The goal tonight have been to show off how you can settle and spawn some Grass by making Resources, using/settling the Visualiser for each Grasses, using/settling each Spawners and then Spawn.

By making/scattering Grasses Coverages and Isolated Grasses well done.

Important to know, when you are adding a Grass Texture, remember to settle the w/h on the same dimensions than the Texture Layer itself;
For example, if the Layer is a square (2048x2048):
w=1,1.5
h=1,1.5

For example, if the Layer is a rectangle (2048x1024):
w=2,3
h=1,1.5


So the 26 Grasses used:



My Terrain Settings:



Settling an "Isolated" Grass on the Visualiser (Note: these are my tweaks, you can always experiment!!!):



Settling a "Coverage" Grass on the Visualiser (Note: these are my tweaks, you can always experiment!!!):


Then after, i settle my Spawners, you can too experiment, i'll not explain that part which is more easy and wide.
I spawn until getting the results expected.
I often resize some of my Grass on the Terrain Paint Details to get the best sizes.

Finally, after checked some times on the Game and settled everything, how it's done, i take some screenshots

A small bunch of screens to show you what i get at the "end":

















Important too, Grass needs good antialiasings, personnally i'm still looking for on Unity sadly...

The Assets used to make that scene (Unity 5.3.4):
Gaia 1.5.3
Some SpeedTree Models (AWE!!!!)
Grass (HQ Photographic Textures Grass Pack Vol.2)
Big Rocks
AQUAS Water Set
3DForge
Volumetric Fog & Mist
Dynamic Fog & Mist
HBAO
Cinematic Image Effects pre-release
Time Of Day
Scion
Colorful FX
Amplify Color
Some others Unity5 Scripts.

I'm near to start the GX Extensions so btw, i hope this, will help some of you

Thanks Adam you are the One!!

 

Awesome stuff @turboscalpeur! And great timing.. lol I should be releasing Vol 7 of my terrain stamp packs this weekend which is a wetlands area pack. Marshes, swamps, and lowland type wetlands areas. If all goes well, I will be also releasing my first POI pack as well. A bit confusing as it will be Vol 7 as well. I know, I haven't released 1-6 of the POI Packs yet, right? lol But I'm finding that I'm doing things and wanting to see certain things while I'm creating and testing the stamps. So I decided to go ahead and try to get a wetlands POI pack ready to release at the same time or shortly after the wetlands stamps pack releases. Then I'm going to work backwards while my assistant works forwards on getting the POI packs caught up.

At any rate, this is awesome spawner configuration type information for your grasses!

 

Oh.. One other note. One thing that I have discovered with the wetlands stamps that I'm working on, for the types of areas I'm envisioning as wetlands, there really isn't much beach area. Generally the plants go to, and sometimes past, the water's edge. So I've actually lowered almost all of my plants to 0 and the ones I want to go into the waterline down to -5.. Same with my textures.. And then plants that I don't want to grow on the sand areas (or mud if you replace your sand with a mud type texture) I add a check in the box to check textures and put !0 in. With default Gaia setup, that is the sand texture and it tells the plant/tree/GameObject to not spawn if the spot is sand. This not only gives you control of what can and can't spawn past your waterline, but also gives you a bit better control of what spawns on any beach area you might have as well.