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

Thanks @Shawn67 !
I'm a lot of interested about your Vol.7 and it's POI in it! will help a lot to create wetlands areas, i'm sure of this!!

Exactly, as you when i want to put Grass on water cauz' it's growing in true life as "the feet" on water, i push down the Min Height below to 0 depending of what kind of Grass and being careful of the Sea level.
For example on that scene, i pushed down the Cattails at -0.5 but it should have been better at -0.25, still need more precisions^^ always.
About the sand Ground, interesting Tweak, i have never did this, thanks
About Grounds on Gaia, i'm now more interested to add more Grounds to get more varieties and realism on my scenes, moreover i need more investigations to get a perfect control on how to spawn or not spawn Grass on Grounds in Gaia, i guess Perlins Masks will help a lot at this stage!

 

FYI, I'm talking two different packs there. This is going to be a Vol 7 Stamps Pack as well as a Vol 7 POI/Spawners Pack. It is going to be confusing at first since this is going to be the first POI Pack, but since it is the companion POI Pack to the wetlands stamps, it will be less confusing in the long run if the companion packs share the same volume number.

 

Awesome screenshots @turboscalpeur, really like it A dream-like scene!

 

Thanks so much turboscalpeur for your Spawn Details. I always forgot to write you for some Ressources but this Screentshot shows already a lot.
Regarding your Grasses Min/ Max Width and Height. This can be set like I want to? Because you sometimes have 0.3 to 0.5 or 1.5 to 2.0. I suppose Coverage Grass should be smaller then Isolated grass like in your screenshots?
After seeing your Screens I simply want to play with a new Terrain and your grasses

@Shawn67
Your Stamps have always a Heightmap Resolution of 1k I suppose? What about Heightmaps with 4k Resolution to really get awesome Heightmaps / Stamps for Terrain? Did someone tried using higher Resultion for Stamps with Gaia?

 

My stamps are created with Gaia. So it is using whatever resolution for them as what Gaia uses. You are the second person that has asked me about that though. Let me talk with Adam and see if that is something I can adjust. I'm wondering if maybe changing GaiaDefaults when I run the Scanner controls the output resolution for heightmap maybe. If so, I'll work on going back and updating existing collections when I go back and add the sessions to them.

 

I have The scanner will create stamps at whatever resolution the source material is provided at.

 

And you have seen rightly @RonnyDance
Mostly the Coverage Grass are smaller than the Isolated Grass; it's give a better harmony to your scene^^ even if i'm adding sometimes too some kind of "Half Coverage" Grass which are near to the sizes of the Coverage Grass as some flowers varieties to still add an extra touch again^^
Hope it's understandable

 

Cool.. I'll start looking for a way to increase the quality of the originals I work off of. Based off of this, I am assuming the satellite captures I start off with are either 1k or something I'm doing when I start working on them in Photoshop maybe downgrades them. I just finished prepping Volume 7 for release tonight. I will go ahead and release it at the same quality as all of the others and will research this and my workflow prior to working on Volume 8. If I can figure out a way to upgrade and have higher resolutions when I make the stamps, I will do that for future packs and go back to update volumes 1 through 7.

Out of curiousity. I've had Terrain Quality Manager in my wishlist for a while now. Have any of you tried using it on any terrains created with my stamps? If so and you have found it works well, let me know. If I don't hear any negative feedback, I'll pick it up when I get my pay for last month's sales this weekend and try it.

 

My question got lost I think.

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

 

Hi - sorry about that - it did slip through. You essentially need to use Gaia one terrain tile at a time. To do this disable all but one tile you want to work on, do your thing with Gaia, and then when you are finished disable that tile, and enable the next one. There is a 'Fit To Terrain' button on the spawners that can help you. It's not as nice as multi-tile out of the box but it is workable. Spawning is fine, but stamps will require more work as you will need to position them exactly for cross tile transitions.

#tip On another topic, we have talked about optimisation a fair bit, and I came across this post today on facebook. There is a nice section on optimisation there : https://unity-game-development.zeef.com/nguyen.thanh.tung

 

So I need to try manually to make transitions smooth, it seems very hard and time consuming to achieve. I'm sure it's been asked a thousand times but will next update include the multi-terrain support and is there any eta?

 

There is not eta. I am so free to quote Adams answer:

 

On the subject of performance, I've noticed that with the the Profiler running, my FPS count increases 30 to 40 FPS - going from the low 80s to 110. I've read about other people seeing the same thing,but I've never seen an explanation for it and whether or not it's a real improvement or just a false reading. The game does seem to be a bit smoother with profiler running.

Any thoughts?

 

@wwg I've noticed this as well, with the profiler running. Not sure what is causing this, but it's kind of annoying as it's hard to tell where real performance is. I find standalone builds run noticeably faster than in-editor as well... perhaps the profiler is profiling with this in mind?

 

The environment can make a huge difference. You may have more objects in your immediate area, then there are the LODs of the objects around, and the objects themselves. Also if you are near visible point lights. It can change depending on what way you are facing if more stuff needs to be drawn in one direction than another. The list goes on. If you see the differences while staying in the same area and are not doing anything different then it may be editor related.

I am no expert but builds should be faster as your system is doing less work. It's just running a built project as opposed to the project and and the editor etc. I would imagine the build has also stripped out lots of unused stuff and has done it's own optimisations.

doc

 

@chingwa,

Forgot to say you can download a couple of free fps counters off the unity wiki. I include one of those in my test builds to try and get a better idea of performance comparing their fps while in editor to when built. It just displays on the screen.

May be useful.

 

Gaia has a FrameRateManager script in the Gaia\Scripts\ValueAdd folder. If memory serves it also allows you to switch (or at least shows) graphics quality as well. Easy enough to add a toggle if you look at code, if it isn't there.. Or set up as a slider like @chingwa did in the Tenkoku demo script. (Nice job on that, btw.. )

 

I forgot that @chingwa makes tenokoku . He'll know miles better than me about this. Didn't know about the frameratemanager script. Thanks for pointing to that.

 

@AdamGoodrich, is it possible to make texture spawner rotatable? I'm using it a lot to texture specific zones, but unfortunately I don't have precision that I want, cause I can't rotate it.

 

#tip Use an image mask with the texture spawner - this provides very precise control over which areas it can spawn in.

Go into Utilities and export a Heightmap image. This will create a grey scale heightmap image which shows your environment and which can be used as a guide to create your image mask.

Add a layer in your favourite image editor and mask out in white the areas you want to spawn in, and in black the areas you don't want to spawn in.

Hide the original height map layer, save the image, and then use the image as a greyscale image mask. This gives you an additional set of control over where the spawner can spawn.

And because all spawning works the same way, this technique can be used with any spawner.

 

Using this, and some of the other goodies in the Utilities folder, might be a good topic for a tutorial. I know there's a lot of good stuff included with Gaia, such as a water flow map generator, and growth script, but haven't really seen much on how to use any of them, even in the manual. I think there's some real treasure buried here that a lot of Gaia users don't know about yet.

 

Totally agree. Even just an overview of all this nice stuff would be good.

 

I should have said in original post that I know about masks. But I encounter situation where just rotating it will be enough and it's quick, where's opening photoshop and drawning isn't. Also I have to use my imagination where to guess where exactly this mask will apply to terrain.

 

Anyone had any experience with PRiSM?? It is on 24H Sale today

 

I have used it - nice asset

 

I love this asset. I did a nice terrain until it wouldn't add water. It ended up being pink. I looked into that when i notice the standard assets won't import so i did a clean scene to see if it was the standard assets in the first place but they actually worked so i tried Gaia after importing standard assets then it all worked. So i have noticed now i have to import the standard assets then Gaia and was wondering is this a bug with Gaia. I have all latest versions.

 

@AdamGoodrich - How does it compare to Scion?

 

It should actually work either way. Where you generally run into problems are with assets that actually bundle Standard Assets in as part of the asset. I really wish Unity had a dependency system where the publishers could flag what assets it needed and strip them out of the new asset. Having them in there if everyone is using the same version of Unity, it isn't a problem. But if the version in the asset is different than the version of Unity you are running, that is where the user usually runs into trouble.

I'm wondering if there are other assets that were in your project when you installed Gaia where one may have done this with the water? To be honest, I've never tested it as the Unity water isn't really that great. I never use it, so I have never installed it. But when I prep my projects, I do install characters, cameras, image effects, environment, and particle system from standard assets right up front. And then I add Gaia, the water I'm going to use (either Aquas or Suimono), sky system, etc.

Also you say the latest versions. Which version of Unity are you using? Technically the latest is 5.3.4 unless you are talking about the 5.4 beta. Might be helpful for Adam to know exactly which one you are using.

 

I actually worked out it is a standard asset problem because i have nothing in scene except for the standard asset and it still is pink. I have got Suimono so i am going to try that.

 

If that was the case, it is likely a lot of people would be reporting the problem. Unity water isn't bad for quick prototyping, but if you have Suimono already I would go ahead and use it instead.

 

Yeah suimono works though.

 

I worked the standard asset problem now. I must had the wrong version standard assets so i download the standard assets from the unity website and it works now. Thanks for all your help.
I will try use suimono later. I'm just wanted the same stuff in that quick start video and wanted to learn gaia first.

 

It's a good habit to always have a quick look at what files a new package is importing (at least for assets you're not familiar with). Uncheck the Standard Assets folder if you see it in the list. Also watch out for things like Unity 4.x Image Effects being included.

 

Assets that include scripts from standard assets is a pet annoyance of mine - they almost always break something because of version inconsistencies!

 

Love those rock layers. I have been trying to achieve that for long without success. Can you share your technique?
Cheers!

 

Would be helpful to know who you are asking. When you are responding to a post with someone's screenshots with questions for them, please click on Reply at the bottom right of their post. That way it quotes their post. Also there may be others of us familiar with tools the person is using. But with 114 pages of posts, it is hard to respond without knowing which post you are talking about.

 

Ups, sorry

 

I think that is his own texture if memory serves and from the looks of things he's also using Distingo which helps bring out features like that in textures quite easily

 

Not sure about the texture, but a few posts down he states he is using RTP, although you could probably get similar results with Distingo. RTP is another great option but with a steeper learning curve.

 

@AdamGoodrich It looks like when I'm spawning grass as a texture it works fine. But when I try to spawn detail mesh, for some reason it spawns several of those meshes in one place. I mean it spawn number of them, but almost always theres a couple detail meshes of same kind in one place. I've been trying to solve this problems for hours and it feels like I've tried every possible setting, but I couldn't solve this problem.

 

A screenshot of your settings would be helpful. Which spawner are you using? Clustered or coverage? What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Do you only want a single one to spawn or you just want them spaced further apart?

Usually for detail spawning, I use the default setup you get when you go the Standard -> Create Spawners route in Gaia Manager. If you only want your grass detail spawner, you would get the same setup by going the Advanced -> Coverage Detail Spawner route. This default setup uses the every location jittered location selector whereas if you added the Clustered Detail Spawner, it would spawn in clusters.

Again, a lot of this is speculation because we have no idea what your settings are like. Is it all of your grasses you are spawning with this spawner or just one of them? Have you watched the tutorial videos located at http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/? Primarily the Spawner Overview and Spawner - Terrain Details/Grasses would probably be a big help.

 

I may be wrong but is a detail similar to a tree in that it would need a collider so the spawner knows something is a already there? Or does gaia work different to this? I would imagine if the spawner is set to do a couple of passes of details and that the seed is the same then gaia would need some way to avoid previously planted objects.

I may be totally wrong though.

 

I did watched tutorials. No matter what settings do I use, when I need to spawn detail mesh for some reason it always spawns couple detail meshes in same places. Changing settings doesn't change that. My guess is that GAIA currently has a problem with detail mesh cause it's doesn't spawn colliers for it, like it does for trees so it can't check if it already spawned something here.

on right you can see what I want, on left you can see what I usually get.



Here's some settings. But as I've said before. I've spend hours playing with settings and didn't get good results.

 

Hi Gua,

I will not have chance to test today but it may be possible to add colliders to the details prefab first and then after spawning remove the colliders and hopefully that would update the scene ones, unless unity terrain system blocks it in some way.

Would be interesting to see a way around this.

 

In your resources file, while looking at Fern_01 unfold the DNA foldout. What do you have there for Bounds Radius and Seed Throw?

Hmmm.. You might be onto something there. I just went back and re-read through and see now where @Gua mentions textures work fine but he is having problems with mesh. I've never tried working with mesh grasses. Other than making grasses harvestable, I'd be curious to hear what benefits there are to having the fern as a mesh instead of a texture? I would think the mesh grasses would be harder on performance, no?

Gonna have to break out SpeedTree's ground cover pack and play around with it. My understanding though from most people that used the SpeedTree plants during beta, they set them up with tree spawners. Unless I totally misunderstood. I know that is how I set up the SpeedWeed Cannabis plants during beta.. You know, for hemp rope harvesting.. Yeah.. That's it.. Rope... heheh

 

Using meshes probably does cost more even with simple low poly ones but from my basic tests it's surprising how many you can get away with on a terrain before adding any performance improving assets or techniques. Just mix up lots more textures with meshes and scatter the plants to suit. If you know the polycount of the plants and trees you could even work out the ratio and scatter based on that. eg. if one tree is 2000 tris and a plant mesh 100 then you can have more plants per tree as long as the plants share materials (I think that's right). At least thats my theory .

 

Yep. it has, but it doesn't affect final results.


I'm not using speedtree and there a lot staff you can do using detail mesh for instead of texture. The fern on screenshots is one example. You can have rocks, branches, sticks and other stuff there.

 

To be honest, I don't want to spend more time on this. I've just spawned texture grass with GAIA and painted detail meshes by hand. I just wanted to see, if there's a known work around and show developer this problem.

 

Hi Guys,

I know that might not belong over here but,
but maybe someone has experience to build such landscapes.
I believe this little flying terrain is made with terrain meshes ?
has anyone experienced to build a landscape in this quality or get out a similar good result ?
be grateful for the help

 

What game was this taken from ?