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

It have been long time I didn't posted on the Gaia Forum so!

Is about the new Asset whose creating @AdamGoodrich called GeNa; I used it tonight for scattering to make some Screenshots of my new Grass Asset's coming soon too







More Screens/Descriptions here

Best,
turboscalpeur

 

Thanks for the ideas
Actually my main goal is to eventually never mess with art again ever I had to do a lot of art work on my first game which made a ton of money. Now I just hire all my art out. But ya I do have to do some photo shop here and there still. Like to one day never have to do that either

 

Must be nice. I'd like to hire out some of what I do, but can't really afford to. In the mean time, I'm head game architect, modeler, artist, animator, coder, and tester. That's why I rely so heavily on assets like Gaia, which do much of the heavy lifting. They reduce an impossible task down to a few much more manageable ones.

 

Hey there,

I just bought Gaia, but i can't install it because (wait for it) it can't get past the download phase, because I don't have the necessary space on my local drive. I'm using an external drive for all my work, and it really sucks that you can't change the asset store downloads directory...

Any possible way of adding the package to my project without going through this damn local C drive?

Thanks!

 

That sounds quite tedious. I am not aware of any way to change the Unity download drive. Suggest you log into a friends machine and download there - and then copy onto your external drive.

On a windows machine Unity will download to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Asset Store-5.x

 

Yeah i found out that location, and it downloaded the temporary file, but can't get to the pkg file. If i get the PKG file from another computer, can I then copy it on my external drive, and then open it to add it to my project, or will it always try to uncompress in my local C drive?

 

Copy it to an external drive. You can then import it as a custom package, and it will be unpacked into the drive / directory that your Unity project is located in.

 

You may not be able to change the download directory, but you can move the assets you've already downloaded to another drive, so they're not taking up space on C. If you've already done that, and cleaned out any other unneeded stuff, and still don't have room, it might be time to get a bigger drive. That isn't a lot of free working space to share for not only Unity, but your operating system, and all the rest of your installed apps. You'll keep banging your head on that ceiling until you raise it.

 

yeah I've been really stupid. my C drive is a partition of a drive, and I allocated just enough for windows and some extra space. Now I'm kinda stuck with this ridiculous low amount of free space on my C drive. Unless there's a way to resize the partition... thanks though for your fast answers, I'm a bit ashamed of my setup here lol

 

You can't change the Asset Store directory, but you can use a hard link or symbolic link to point the Asset Store 5.x directory to another location: http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

I have Unity installed on a 256GB SSD, but I have the Asset Store 5.x directory pointing to a location on my 1TB HDD.

 

wow thanks so much! ill give it a try!

 

There is any nice solution to add some erosion on Gaia terrains?

 

Hey!

If anybody interested to the continuation of the SpeedTree grass system, there's now also a tree system! Check it out here.

100k trees at 150-450FPS on a GTX970 DX9/11, almost perfect transitions, done in 1 week and a little.

 

Hi, I am having problems with a custom stamp. When stamping it, the results are smaller than the stamp!

This shows the stamp's size:


This is what I end up with when stamping:


What am I doing wrong?

Also, how would I go about raising the terrain so it starts above sea level? Is lowering the sea level the only option? What happens if I do that and start trying to match multiple terrains togeter? It must be hell if all sea levels at different height.

Thanks for your help!
Fred.

 

Actually, this is very good question and I have been wondering if anyone else has a Gaia related solution, or for that matter a 3rd party solution?

I have been using Erosion Brush, which does a reasonable job, but you need to point and click on every point you want eroded. I'd really appreciate some feedback on this too.

 

Since Gaia uses stamps, the best way is to make stamps that already have erosion built into them. This happens automatically if you use real world DEM data to make your stamps, or programs like World Machine, that can add erosion procedurally, and export erosion maps. You'll also get realistic erosion in stamp packs provided by @Shawn67.

Another often overlooked feature of Gaia is the Waterflow Mask Exporter, located in the Utilities section. You can use this to create a texturing mask for instance, to add more vegetation coloring in areas that would have greater water flow. You can see an example in post #3580 of this thread.

But if you still think you need more erosion, you can try Terrain Water Erosion, by Dmitry Soldatenkov. It works fairly well, and the price is right.

 

@Sliceandkill @TheSeawolf Why dont you use the erosion tool from the old terrain toolkit? It trows out a couple errors but Its easy to fix them. I got it working on 5.4.1f1 in no time. I guess I could put it online somewhere if you guys are interested.

 

I have an erosion system.. but its not what I would consider to be good enough to publish yet :/

Lift your stamp up when you stamp. Alternatively use the For Masked Stencil stamp in the Adhoc stamps category. Set the stamp type to Stencil and set the height you wish to adjust the terrain height to - it will raise or lower the terrain by that amount.

There are plenty of tutorials on the Procedural Worlds web site - check here: http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/

 

@AdamGoodrich Yes I checked those allready, I guess I missed that part. Ive been researching tons of assets, my head is a bit fuzzy What about my custom stamp problem?

In the red oval bellow, why does the stamp's effect stops at the green line? Shouldnt it extend all the way to the edge of the stamp as long as there is terrain underneat?

Also I just realised the resulting shape is the entire stamp but it's squished on the Z axis.

 

For anyone who is interested in lots and lots of fast SpeedTrees in Unity I have been collaborating with the Unity terrain engineers and @Dannyoakes from SpeedTree - and there is some great stuff coming with SpeedTree instancing!

Grab yourself a copy of 5.5 - the latest at the time of writing this was Beta 7. Use Gaia to create yourself a nice empty terrain.

Click on the terrain and Uncheck "Bake Light Probes For Trees".

Then select each of your SpeedTree .spm files and do the following:
* On LOD 0, select Fastest in Wind Quality, on all other LOD's select None
* On all LOD's unselect Use Light Probes.

Then click Regenerate Materials.

Then spawn lots of trees and check out instancing! When you get it right the performance difference is incredible!

Instancing already makes a substantial performance improvement, and more optimizations are coming!

 

I was going to mention that as well, since I still use it sometimes, and it still works fine in the latest Unity once the script importer updates it. Besides the erosion brush, it also has various procedural tools to create, erode, and texture terrain, though it lacks Gaia's spawners and other amazing features. Since it's no longer available on the Asset Store, I skipped it in my first post, but after a bit of digging, found that the code is still freely available from the original creators (Six Times Nothing) for anyone who still wants it: unityterraintoolkit archive

 

The only reason that makes sense to me is that you originally scanned a non square object.

 

This tool kit was a great inspiration for me when I was first learning about Unity terrain!

 

Yep that exactly it. I was just testing this and saw your post.

Thank you!

 

Really? Instancing for dx11+ only when we should have some low-level system optimizations that work like the SpeedTree the docs? It's just that the Unity guys are too lazy to work using the low-level SpeedTree sollution.

I already tested a lot again and again in 5.5 the SpeedTree trees and at 20k+ trees the system starts collapsing. Not happy at all, the performance is not very different. And I don't want to turn off the LightProbes or wind for my trees so that their instancing 'might' work.

Determined me to build my own system that covers all those limitations and still looks and works great.

What we need is to convince them to implement the system like described in the SpeedTree's documentation with some little improvements, nothing else. We absolutely do not need further improvements to current system. We want it re-made. Should take 1-2 weeks to the Unity team, if it took me 1-2 week for mine. SpeedTrees with wind and the best transitions, optimized for hundreds of thousands of trees.

[Edit]
My system doesn't need special handling, it is made to work with Gaia. I've just placed a bunch of trees with Gaia, pressed a button that added them to my system and that's all. You can edit/work with them just like you do with normal SpeedTrees, and after you are done press 'regenerate'.

 

Nice! Looking forward to having a play with it

 

Thanks! I'll try to get it going as fast as possible. Feel free to download the demo in the meantime.

 

I am just about to launch GeNa as well. Aim is to get it out there this weekend. GeNa speeds up tree spawning over Gaia by orders of magnitude as I was able to remove the requirement to add colliders.

 

That's awesome, since I need to place SpeedTree trees that are actually grass. Boy, that was a pain! I hope GeNa will fix it

 

You might like this then....

In the image below GeNa is placing multiple types of objects - in this case grasses - based on the colour image mask being passed in. Each resource is keyed into a different colour in the mask, and because its all coming from the original image, the physical relationship between one resource and the next is being maintained.

This could just as easily be a house and garden with multiple different types of plants and objects being placed.

 

Hello there,

I'm giving Gaia my first try for my level design. Following the tutorial to see what i can achieve in a small amount of time, i was, indeed, very impressed.

I just have a quick question here. Any idea how I can fix this ? It looks like there is some LOD problems or something with my trees.



Cheers!

 

Regenerate the materials on your speedtrees. Follow the quick start guide.. its one of the first things you do.

 

Oh thanks, I figured I didn't have to do it since I wasn't getting any errors about it (like in the tutorial) when I first imported Gaia.

 

Here is another sample of the image mask spawning being introduced in GeNa.

What it shows is multiple different assets, each being keyed into different colours. Am very happy with how this has come together!

Implementing this exposed a bunch of other things - which I ended up improving as well - so GeNa will take a little longer to go live.

 

You can think of Gena as a smart addition to Gaia, or your terrain tool of choice.

I will be launching at a discounted rate to coincide with Unite here on 31st October as a thank you to all the people who have helped test it and to those who continue to support Gaia here.

So pay attention for the launch announcement if you think it might be useful

 

I bought Gaia a few weeks ago. Why should I buy GeNa? Is it a replacement - a modernization of Gaia? Do I still need Gaia? Is there any pre sale information?

 

It's not a replacement for Gaia, nor does it devalue Gaia, as Gaia is an excellent tool to do all the heavy lifting in your scenes.

Gena takes the spawning ideas I started with Gaia in a bunch of new directions, and adds a stack more capability. You won't need it to use with Gaia, but you might want to use it because of the different things it does and the different ways it does it

I am putting the presales information together still and will share when it is ready.

 

Is it designed mostly as an editing tool or could it also be used to spawn sets of detail meshes at runtime? E. g. could it be used to handle the spawning of crops of a farm placed in a RTS?

 

Absolutely!

In the following samples you can see the placement of grass, trees, and a bunch of houses, all driven off the mask shown below.



The trees have been assigned to the yellow section. The red flowers to the brown section, and the buildings to the orange section.

In the image below you can see the spawned output along with the visualiser. Its sort of hard to see below, but there is a little green arrow in the centre of the visualiser.. this shows the direction that this is collectively being spawned.



And here it is in game...



And below is another one - i hit spawn twice and rotated the direction slightly differently each time.

Notice how the houses obey the overall direction of the spawn, and also notice that every one is different... this is a really terrific way of making environments just by painting masks and then intelligently placing them into your scene.

This technique could do an entire village in one hit. And the spawners can then be saved as prefabs, so that whenever you want them again, they are available.



I am really excited about Gena - Gaia is awesome - and with Gena you can take your environments to a whole new level again.

 

I just hope the Asset Store doesn't take too long to push it through.

@FargleBargle and others. I have created the Waterflow Mask Exporter as suggested and the image comes out quite well. How do I apply the mask, do I need to make a stamp of it and then apply it as an area mask like in Tutorial Stamper 3?

 

Hi Adam,

this means that I create such a 2D drawing (color mask) and tell GeNa then, on which color range which asset has to be spawned? How can you place and scale such masks in the terrain?

 

You shift click to visualise, drag click to rotate, and then ctrl click to apply. To resize it you use the mouse wheel.

I assume you want to use it to highlight where water flows in your terrain ? To do this create a texture spawner, select the texture you want to be applied, add the exported water mask as an image mask, and then spawn to texture. If you get stuck drop me a line.

 

Hi, I've created my own terrain and added a few small details with a gaia stamp. I'm trying to spawn grass (details) but if I have virgin terrain checked no part of my terrain is suitable even though there is nothing else on it. Any suggestions of what to look for please?

 

Make sure the Y setting on your terrain object is set to zero. This the usual reason why nothing spawns.

If its not that then make sure what you are stamping exceeds sea level - this is the blue plane - all the grasses should be above seal level.

 

Ok thanks

 

awesome ....I see huge potentialities and an "agile" workflow ..I cannot wait .. consider that already in my asset's bucket ...looking forward

 

That's really cool! Would it also be possible to define a min or max amount per object? To stay with the example of spawning a farm in real-time, you'd want to specify to at least spawn 1 but at most 3 farm houses per stamp of the brush. Would that be possible?

 

Yes - this is built in

You can also set up distributions of one object vs another e.g. 70 / 20 / 10

 

Another very cool feature is gravity - Gena uses gravity to enable you to create natural distributions of objects in your environments... its rather fun to play with.

 

Came across this curated list of videos on game design - thought some of you might get some enjoyment from it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IPUMhchJmaYXeLjJJ9pW-fr8Y5-pasWR1Af_AFnta2w/htmlview