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

There were a lot of changes... your mileage may vary.

 

I shall test it again next week ... busy atm

 

I have a question regarding the procedural terrain:
1. Is the procedural terrain infinite like MagicMap? (or was it MapMagic?)
2. Can I add loading bar when its generating the spawn "chunks"?
3. Can I add a navmesh to the terrain?
4. Can I deform the terrain at runtime?
5. Can I add custom components to the trees?
6. Can I spawn kingdoms/towns?
7. Can I spawn animals/monsters?
8. By "one license per seat" do you mean one license per person? Or per project?
9. How does the procedural world affect performance?

 

1./2. Im not sure if Gaia can do this, someone else will have to confirm or deny. I think that Gaia is more targeted towards creating a world to your satisfaction and then using that, rather than creating the world at runtime. Gaia also only works with one terrain. If you need infinite terrain generation and runtime terrain generation, than you might be better off with MapMagic or Terrain Composer 2.
3. Gaia creates regular unity terrains, so yes
4. yes (this is outside the scope of gaia though. unity provides apis for modifying the terrain heightmap)
5. yes
6. yes
7. yes
8. I believe that this means one license per person that is working with the asset. Again, someone else might need to confirm this
9. Its unity terrains that you are generating, so it depends on the settings for the terrains, and the density of objects you spawn with the spawners

 

Not sure if anyone was aware, but Terrain Engine (unity asset) just got acquired and now has indie friendly licensing. So for those wanting to mix Gaia with some voxely goodness (there apparently is a Unity standard terrain and object import), well, you finally have your shot. XD

And, it is on sale for closed source $199 up to re-release on Nov 1st. Keeping in mind it was only previously avalable as full source for like $6k+, and that sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/t...hexagonal-infinite-procedural-terrain.174595/

Some additional bullet points that stood out to me on the tin, besides those sexy, sexy voxels of course, , ,
Are:
1) Included multithreaded 3D pathfinding, and
2) A high performance solution for LOD / massive amounts of foliage that supposedly works well.

 

@rasto61 Answered this quite well

No. There are a range of opinions on this. Mine is that infinite terrains aren't particularly interesting. Gaia's design reflects this.

I assume you are wanting runtime support. Some people have made Gaia work at run time but its primarily a design time tool. You would have to code your own. You could use the loading bars in the editor as a template.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. You would need to spawn them as gameobjects if these components has scripts attached.

Yes. Its one of Gaia's more powerful features.

Yes.

One licence per person. Use in as many games as you want.

Same as a manually generated world Gaia generates standard Unity terrains, and as such is subject to all of the nuances and limitations of Unity.

I have written an article on scene optimisation with Unity - the concepts are the same regardless of whether or not you use Gaia. You can find it here : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/mobile-unity-scene-optimisation-with-gaia/

 

Following up from my last post, I commented on optimisation and provided a link to my article on it : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/mobile-unity-scene-optimisation-with-gaia/

If anyone has additional insights or cool links on optimisation then please share them. I want to build a repository of information that we can all benefit from.

 

Is there any way to make it infinite? I want to make an open-world survival game with it.

 

Since Gaia is simply a tool to help you create great looking standard Unity terrains, its terrains are no more "infinite" than any other standard Unity terrain. The same rules that affect all other Unity terrains apply to Gaia terrains, and they are subject to all same size and performance limitations.

Even so, 4k x 4k terrains are not uncommon, providing lots of room to move around. If you need more than that, you have the same options as anyone else using standard terrains: create multiple terrain tiles, and stitch them together as needed, or get some kind of terrain streaming software that works with standard terrains. If you can wait a while, multi-terrain tiles have been promised in a future Gaia release, but if you can't, there are several options already available from the Asset Store that will let you do this.

 

create a tileable terrain, you need a tileable heightmap, and write some code to dupe the terrain at runtime maybe

 

As @FargleBargle commented Unity does not inherently support this. Tileable terrain support will come in a future release of Gaia and even then, Unity is still limits the size of your environments.

FYI, the limitation is that Unity uses floats to represent the position objects in x,y,z space and this inherently limits the size available to you. There is a technique that allows you to get around this by rebasing your entire world back to zero based on the position of the player, but its not trivial, and is well beyond the scope of Gaia and terrain solutions in general.

 

It's notable that on 32bit float you have 20km range before precision jump to one centimeter per unit (ie 10km around origin). So keep that in mind when doing infinite terrain. BTW unity don't let you zoom out to see more than that at the same time!

 

I guess I'll just use the tileable terrain then..I'll wait. Oh and, for the tileable option do you specify the tile size?

 

You specify tile size in Gaia Defaults. Gaia does not yet support multi tile. The rather clunky work around is to disable all other tiles and just work on one tile at a time.

 

Yes, still do not support multi tiles

Waiting more then a year now for that feature that you wrote will come shortly after the initial release and the reason i was interested in GAIA and bought it early to support you.

I am not saying that GAIA is not good becouse it is great in what is does.

What makes me angry is the ignorance for that long time to your customers that want the feature that you told is will come in the next release. Come soon, come after this or that importend other thing.
I know good things will take time but this is now more then a year and instead of fullfill your own words you produce other assets.

In the end i am the bad person who remind you on your own words and all the fanboys will tell me how good GAIA and your support is and that i can use other tools or just saying nothing.

I do not want the money back, i want support good services and good asset producers.
This kind of behavior is not good in my opinion.

 

The problem is that developers sometimes get caught up in the excitement of a successful release and then make predictions of time scales for future features that they can't possibly keep. Also circumstances change, people have lives where other commitments can intrude on plans. Developers also get distracted and even lose sight of the value of a particular feature.
I tend to take a "I'll believe it when I see it" approach.

 

I take the same approach but also want to ask about that feature and mention the time so it will not simply be forgotten.
I knew there is life and such but hey, more then a year now.

 

I'm just going to post this here so more people are aware... New Combined PostFX stack for Unity, includes SSR, TxAA, HDR Color Grading and more: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/new-post-processing-stack-pre-release.435581/

 

Gaia has been on the asset store for less than a year, but you are right, multi-tile is late and I do apologize for the delay.

As Daniel has commented, things change, and so has my ability to be devoted full time to the development of Gaia. The reality of the asset store as a publisher is that people want and expect professional quality but are not prepared to pay professional rates or maintenance. A quick look at the dead and deprecated assets on the store will show the truth of this.

The outcome of this for me is that I have taken on additional work to make up for the shortfall, and this has slowed my ability to develop new features for Gaia, however I am still very committed to Gaia and this should be obvious through the presence and support I deliver here.

For those of you who are into living dangerously, Gaia already supports multi-tile terrain creation. Go into GaiaDefaults.cs and remove the [HideInInspector] tags and the preceding commas on lines 27 and 30. This will expose a tiles setting when in your Gaia Defaults and newly created environments will be created with all tiles laid out and and pre-populated with trees, textures etc.

I haven't shared this because its not as well tested as the rest of the system, and because not all of Gaia supports multi tile. However, this will still help you in setting up your environments, and you can still use Gaia in your environment by enabling and working with one tile at a time.

Spawning works just fine tile by tile, but cross tile stamping still has some issues. You can get around this with some creativity and Terrain Stitcher ($4.99).

 

Hi Adam,
is there any plan for further features in Gaia ? and what is the timeline ? It is really amazing tool for people like me, who are not Artist, but only nice and funny developer. Thanks

 

Yes - pure multi-tile with no work arounds - improvements in spawning - the addition of skyboxes and a set of nice skies - and some nice new changes to lighting setups. I hope to have these in the next few months - but that will depend on my workload - I may trickle them down in quicker releases - but with such a large asset - people tend to get annoyed with this.

 

It sounds a good plan ..at least for us .. thanks a lot ..

 

Did I miss any posts about Gena or are you holding off on that for now? Just curious about its potential. =]

 

Just wanted to draw extra attention to this. Very few asset publishers are able to make a living off of the Asset Store, so inevitably asset development ends up being a part-time thing taken on when it doesn't conflict with what actually pays the bills. We have all come to expect that assets will be updated with new features over time at no additional cost, which only works if those updates drive more sales. However, if sales drop off after a while, we still expect those updates and features (at no cost), which is rather ridiculous and unfair when you stop to think about it.

When it comes to estimating how long a given feature will take to implement... well let's just say that software development in general does not have a good track record here. Much of the time, it pretty much amounts to pulling numbers out of your butt in order to appease a manager, even for experienced professionals.

Because features can sometimes end up taking exponentially longer to implement than originally thought, it is generally unwise to purchase software based on what features are planned for future updates. Note that I said "planned" and not "promised." Often if a feature proves to be significantly more difficult or time-consuming to implement than originally thought, that feature gets bumped down the list so that development isn't completely stalled because of this single feature. Sometimes it gets delayed to the next major version, and sometimes it gets dropped completely. That's the nature of the beast.

 

Yes he is holding off on this as I'm guessing it's sort of like that box given to Pandora as a gift!

Personally, I think he's sitting there saying to his minions (beta testers).... I have a plan so cunning, you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel!

Seriously though, please forgive me if this has been mentioned before. My cunning plan has been to create maps at 16384 and slice them down to smaller sizes later on if needed. It's working well with the exception that when initially altering the stamp width of 151, the width automatically resets itself to default at 100, thus not allowing the stamp to maintain it's optimal size. Is there an easy fix for this @AdamGoodrich ?

It's not a major deal by any means, but I would find it preferential to maintain the optimal integrity of the quasi and or pseudo morphological state created from a real life 8km2 terrain compressed into a 2km2 unity terrain, without having to manually alter the height and width toggles.

 

Hi !!
How do i add new "feature type" ?
Thank!!

 

hey zmaxz, I have talked to @Shawn67 about this and I thought feature types folders were hardcoded at the moment.

 

Yes they are. It started out as a simple thing with just a few categories and then grew. In hindsight I should have made it generic and easily extensible.

You could re-purpose an existing directory by deleting the stamps you are not interested in.

I will look into it and get back to you.

Much as its sort of embarrassing to admit, even after 30 years of doing this professionally, I still find it really hard to estimate how long and how much. The problem is that you don't what the issues are until you dig into the detail.

A great example of this was the stamper. My initial implementation worked really well... until people started changing resolutions.. at which point it failed miserably. It then took me about 3 weeks to re-do it from scratch. For those paying attention a few posts back, this is why the multi tile feature exists but is hidden. The underlying technology already supports it.

GeNa will be coming soon. I have made some awesome advancements to the spawning algorithms, and some of this will be fed back into Gaia. GeNa is suffering from the same issue as Gaia. I want to release something that is fresh, simple and powerful

Btw the GeNa beta is already being used by games like Crowfall and Pantheon - and the feedback has been very positive.

 

@AdamGoodrich
You are right your asset was in the asset store 28th oktober 2015.
What i refer to is your statement on 29th may 2015 so the second post on the 3rd site of this thread, another one on the 29th june 2015 and more.

@TeagansDad
I fully agree with you and wrote something like that i think two years ago in this forum.
There is no problem for me to pay for an update that bring new features and that help to let live this asset for longer like i also pay for Adobe or many other software developers.
Also i wrote i want to support asset developers so i bought for example this asset before i need it.
(If there are assets in a field i need i mostly buy all of them so that i can choose wich one is better for the next project and GAIA have some benefits in some areas so i would like to use it.)

I think my main problem is that i trust to much in peoples words and want to see results and here i only read again and again that it will come. The more time is gone the often i will read it will take longer even if patient customers (or future customers) like me read that and only ask here and there for that feature.
So by the way, not only i asked for that feature that i read will come and is demanded.
The comunicatian was wrong with this and i hope asset developers take this professional and not personal.

So i like GAIA and what come from AdamGoddRich and do not want to disturb this thread anymore becouse as i understand from Adams reaction he will do the right things.

 

Hi,
at this time I need to extend my scene horizon. I know the two packages :
1) Horizon
2) HBAO

If someone has experience I would know for both :
a) Does it have Gaia Extension ? Btw... I find Gaia Exenstion really handy.
b) What is the best in terms of perfomance and from realism point of view ?

 

Hey, a very nice thing Gaia is, only problem I keep facing, is that when I spawn trees they all keep exact same rotation, wich, in case of angled or split tree stumps looks really annoying. Is there a way to assign random rotation on Y axis when spawning?
Thanks)

 

Gaia does randomly rotate trees. Not sure why your scenario would be any different unless you have changed the config somehow.

Make sure that you also check more than 2 trees - i have thought the same thing at times - then looked at more trees and realised that it was a spawn where the rotation of the initial two trees was similar.

 

You are right, on totally new project rotation works fine
Can you,please, point me to some checkbox that enables it in spawner, or where else it is enabled?)

 

Congratulations Adam, what a stunning product. I've forked out a few hundred on stock assets for our new game and this is the only one I felt super motivated to review. Gaia has probably made our upcoming SteamVR title commercially viable. I can't thank you enough for this.

Enough gushing though

If and when you get a chance, can you take a look at this video?

This is a basic map generated following the introductory tutorial to the letter as far as I could tell (S***, sorry, more gushing, well done on the intro docs).

At 0:45, you can see a reflection of the trees in the water. What I have noticed is that these reflections don't work well in VR - the reflections don't seem to map well to the binocular vision of the HMD cameras, probably because its inverted or something. Aside from letting you know about it, I'm mostly interested in working out how to disable them - if I need to do it at generation its time to do so now before I start populating the world!

At about 1:20 and beyond as we explore the little farm, the boulders have noticeable pop-in and some LOD texture issues. Is there a setting we can tweak to adjust this (ideally after generation so it can be a performance setting) so that the detail is loaded more promptly?

Sincere apologies if this is actually just newbie Unity stuff that I should really know Have been developing for a long time and this is our first real swing at game dev so its a mix of .

Oh also: GTX1080, 12Gb RAM, a recent i5 of some description, Unity 5.4.1f1

 

I have Horizon, but never taken the time to work out how to use it... it seems to do amazing things for distant views, and if you look back through the posts in the forum you will see that people have used it to do some cool things with Gaia.

I also have HBAO - which is a really nice Ambient Occlusion plugin. Works really well.

There isn't an integration for Horizon - if you want to ask their authors to do them then I would be happy to work with them to get them going. The documentation for how to do this is here : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/gaia-extensions/how-to-create-a-gaia-extension/

I got this confused with GameObject spawning (where you can control the rotation), Terrain Tree spawning is always automatically rotated.

Thanks

This is standard Unity water - I set it up in the scene for you as a convenience. You can go into it's settings and disable reflections. Here is the documentation on it : https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/HOWTO-Water.html

Yep this is LOD popping. The rocks are a free sample from Motuproprio's Real Rocks pack and from memory the LODS are set up based on what they supplied : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/18476. All of their rock packs are awesome!

In hindsight I was never happy with the LOD levels either, and I think I will adjust for the next release of Gaia. If you want to change them - check out the doco here : https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-LODGroup.html

Btw - awesome work with your scene !!

 

As a follow up from the previous post - here is a little video that I have shown before.

It gives you a sense of the wide variation that you can get with the tool set.

Also as a heads up, I am presenting at Unite in Melbourne Australia on the 31st of October, and then on the TAFE stand at PAX a few days later. If you happen to be there then drop in and say gidday

Here is a link to the Unite speaker schedule : https://indd.adobe.com/view/afdd8875-cd99-4265-9457-cde3e7c07ad6

I hope to be making some cool announcements before then

 

Maybe a youtube video Tutorial

 

That's what I am trying to achieve ....nice ..looking forward all those new features

 

GeNa is now feature complete and in final testing!!

Just need to finish the documentation and will launch it. Eta is this weekend!!

 

Its not possible to do sand dunes like this with Gaia is it? Don't think it can sculpture dunes like this.

 

This is great news Adam

Yes it can very easily sculpture dunes like that. The asset comes with dune stamps, plus @Shawn67 , also has dune and desert stamps with his stamp pack.

Dunes are simple to create!

 

Nice to read that ....
I am wondering about the features in GeNa ..... I bought Gaia 2 months ago and I have been exploring the tool for 2 weeks .. it's really amazing tool ...

 

I will create a forum for GeNa shortly and will start documenting its features there.

 

Guess im still trying to figure out how to use stamps in Gaia. When I do stamps they don't show up. Its like they are slightly applied or something.

If @Shawn67 package has dunes I don't see them in the screen shots showing this. I see a few dunes but there not like the dunes in the picture I showed.

 

There are a bunch of tutorials on stamping here : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/

Don't forget to experiment with scaling and rotation, and both additive and subtractive stamping. You will need to use various masks to get the results you want.

Alternatively you can use tools like world machine to create the shapes you want, and then scan them into Gaia to use as stamps. If you are more comfortable with tools like Maya, or ZBrush you can export as meshes and scan as stamps as well.

Scanning and then mixing and matching and blending stamps gives you virtually unlimited possibilities.

 

Cool .. really excited .. next week I start to work on the enviroment for my first game ....so it looks like that arrive at right time to have more feature form GeNa in combination with Gaia... really cool

 

Idk that's way more work than I want to do lol. I have no patience at all when it comes to art. That's why I bought the auto generator lol. Hopefully I can figure out the stamping. I'll check tutorials out. But ya I was messing with the settings for the placing the stamp. My maps are 8k square. So pretty big. It's a flying game so they need to be that large. Performance seems ok so far.

By the way the ability to add in towns\gameobjects randomly is going to be a massive time saver for the game I'm making. So glad that's part of gaia

I wish gaia did roads like dirt paths.

 

It can do paths. Make a hand drawn layout by drawing white paths on a black background. You can stamp it into the terrain using stencil mode, if you want to give it a worn in look, and then use it as a mask to place your path texture. Of course that may be more work than you want as well, if you have no patience for art. But this is game design... you must have known art would enter into it at some point.

 

Hey Shadowing, just to echo what Adam mentioned, you need to watch the tutorials. I can't emphasise the value of this enough as the tutorials are jam packed with hints and tips in real time and explained slowly so that someone using Gaia for the very first time can create something straight away.

Just because the default stamp may have shallow dunes, this is quickly altered by marginally increasing the height. Keep working at it!

 

Gaia can do paths... you need to do masks to achieve this. I have something else partially done that makes this even easier... but just have lots of things on my plate at moment... so it will have to wait