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

Could you share some of those Gena spawners (either in the base Gena package or as an external download) so that we can see how you have them configured?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I find that I tend to learn best from studying examples (as opposed to watching tutorial videos or even reading the documentation).

 

I can't wait for the upcoming update!
Oh, and can anybody recommend me some nice textures? Preferably photorealistic, and not that much.

 

Thanks for the thought, and as much as I'd like to say yes it really is a not now scenario. I have a very small spending limits at the moment due to spending out on a few things the last few weeks that were needed, and Gaia took the last of it, rofl. Now that I have Gaia and can start practising on it I can start designing basic terrains and add the buildings at a later date once I have an idea what they can be used for. Your buildings are great for what I aim to use them for and I have had them favorited for a while as well so will definitely be on my shopping list at some point in the future

But I am sure other's will find your special more than great

 

Hi there,

I have not made GeNa ones other then test ones to share, but lets use the ones you already have.
Let me explain

I presume you have Gaia, GeNa and the Village Exteriors Kit installed
With the GeNa tutorial video below Adam shows how to make them

1. Open a clean scene and add a small terrain of say 100m x 100m
2. Open Gaia and excess the 12 new POI's that the latest Village Exteriors Kit update has included
3. Add only one of them and spawn it on the flat small terrain
4. Open Gena, grab the prefabs that was spawned on small terrain and make own GeNa spawner as shown in the video
5. There you have it, 12 pre-done Small holdings to use
   
   
   Cheers
   Cobus​

 

Hey @Xrystal

100%, several others have already made use of the discount so it def was a good idea anyway.

It will still run for the next 10 days, same as the BIRTHDAY BONANZA SALE
Thanks for the very positive remarks and support in that way.
Hope to see you around soon

Cheers
Cobus

 

One thing I have noticed is that it isn't clear what is needed from the terrain generation for continuous use. It looks like the spawners spawn their objects in the Gaia game object rather than as a sub object of the Gaia Environment game object. I've already made the mistake of making a prefab out of the Gaia Environment game object thinking everything was in there for the first few terrains I have made, which is a pity as they did look pretty good.

If you could see if the following suggestions are worthy a look see at being incorporated in some way at some point in the future it may help alleviate first use mistakes

1. When creating the spawner parent objects, parent them inside the Gaia Environment Hierarchy. That way we know everything in that hierarchy is for that terrain. And not accidentally delete the Gaia object not realising that is where the spawned objects were being placed.

2. When creating scriptable objects for the terrain, maybe similarly have these created inside a folder for that terrain so that all the necessary data and settings for the terrain are in one place. That way if we decide to export we're not hunting down what goes with it. This was after finding several instances of scriptable objects of terrains I had either exported ( for use later ) or deleted littered around the project I have been using for Gaia generation.

Just a thought

 

Can you assign and use your own textures when spawning the texture over the Gaia terrain?

 

Its largely editor focussed - but if you look at the editor code you can see how it interacts with the Gaia code.

There is a hidden setting for this - it will be exposed properly when I do mutli-tile.

Not without coding your part.

Yes. Gaia is just plain old unity terrain.

No problem. Spawners will spawn on any terrain whether Gaia created it or not.

Yep - never occurred to me to show normal unity behaviour - but yep - I tend to use bits n pieces of everything when I work.

 

Yes. The scanner utiltiy can convert meshes into stamps as long as you add a mesh collider to them first.

Yep i plan to do this - in fact i plan to do more by pre-configuring them for common usage scenarios like I do with Gaia. In Gaia all the different types of spawners are just the same thing configured in different ways.

NatureManufacture makes some lovely ground textures :
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/page=1/sortby=popularity/query=publisher:6887

Thanks for the suggestions. I plan to improve the general way I organise resources in the next release.

Yes. Please see the tutorials at http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/. You will find videos on resource management and texture spwaning.

 

So is that a yes that it is possible ? Are the required functions public to external classes or only internal classes etc ?

Yeah, I saw the setting and changed it to see how close it was to working I realised the rest of the auto generating steps insist on the single terrain patch. So reset it back

Is there a chance you can set up a simple example of how we would do this or is it the case of seek and ye shall find ?

Will we be restricted to the same unity terrain restrictions of only being able to smooth/sculpt a single terrain at a time or will you incorporate a way of working on all the terrains together such as an auto stitcher/separator etc.

 

Yes. As mentioned people have done it. I don't support it. The relevant methods are public and internally documented.

There is an undocumented runtime stamper sample class in there - but with an impending and major refactor I will not be spending the significant amount of time it would take to document this to a professional level. Use at own risk.

Mutli-tile - as in the seamless use of all tiles as if they were a single entity.

 

Quite understandable in both cases. Just trying to work out when and how I can use your great asset to it's best potential

Cool, this might help me utilise it for a *big* landscape.


I have been looking at the game you linked in the very first post here and how they deal with multiple tile landscapes are how I envisioned the use of the terrain system a while back but thought it was 'cheating' to keep the edges of the connecting terrains at the same constant level to allow easier connections.

 

Another thought has come to mind now that I have required the ability to do it twice so far

That lovely little undo button and it's sibling the redo button. How easy would it be to make it more than 1 step? Twice now I haven't noticed the mismatch squared off terrain because of misalignment and now I can't go back to the stage before it. Not as important as the rest of the changes I am sure you have listed but thought I would offer it as a suggestion if it was something people have mentioned before and it was relatively easy to incorporate without breaking anything else rofl.

 

Any thoughts on this error "Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaExtensionExporterEditor.cs(155,32): error CS0117: `EventType' does not contain a definition for `DragPerform'"? it always comes along with "Assets/Gaia/Scripts/Editor/GaiaExtensionExporterEditor.cs(154,32): error CS0117: `EventType' does not contain a definition for `DragUpdated'"

 

I'd look into the Session Manager (starting on page 9 of the Gaia manual). It records each of the steps used to create a terrain, and can play them all back again later. You can edit the session file to disable any steps you want to omit (see page 13).

 

*slaps head* thanks, didn't think of this. Theres an actual manual? I thought there were just 2 small guides. Will have to take another look for that manual.



Oh wait, I did look at it briefly after going through the tutorial but forgot all about it .. time for some light reading. Thanks again.

 

Crowfall has made their own terrain compositing system, and they use Gaia and Gena to help create their terrain parcels. It looks like an amazing game - cant wait till it comes out.

 

Yeah that's the one. When I looked at their terrain parcels, on one of their recent videos, it looked like they had made the edges of the same height on each of the parcels, which was one of my initial thoughts on how to quick and dirty line up terrain patches, if not created on the fly for infinite terrain but instead pseudo randomly chosen and placed alongside other tiles with the same base line and thus lining up but following the same *rules*. What I haven't figured out though is how they created the 4 zig-zag tile to have a continuous mountain range on them when Gaia only lets you stamp on one terrain patch at a time.

Currently reading the manual and will start playing with the creation of custom defaults, settings etc for the different type of terrains. One of the newest problems I have come across may get resolved this way but here's the image of what I mean.

The sand you see near the edge of the patch I wanted to have as grass ( easily changed by having a lowlands patch with grass as the base texture ) but I also had to turn off water as it fully covered up that sandy area as it was at the same offset as sea level. Is there a minimum or maximum value to sea level ? Can we safely disable/remove the water or scale it to fit the patch so that each patch has it's own water table with differing heights dependant on what type of tile it is, of course after the terraforming has been finished.?

 

Good to see you getting your hands dirty - and great questions

All texturing is done 'relative' to sea level. You can change it in the session manager, and then re-texture, and all the new levels will be handled automatically.

I am pretty sure that Crowfall makes larger parcels and then cuts them up - that's why they all fit perfectly together.

Take a look here for a lot more information on how the different parts of Gaia work: http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/

I actually did a 2 day hands on course for Gaia, and at the end of 2 days still had not touched on all its capability

 

I can believe that rofl. I haven't finished the manual yet but it looks like the distance mask is what can help me make edge connections easier, but so far it hasn't been doing what the manual is demonstrating. Definitely will have to go through those tutorials and see if they help me understand it all better

Crowfall making larger terrains and then cutting them up as needed makes sense, as I believe they did say they make different size patches and the way the example parcels look it sounds like they may be doing a terrain stitcher thing and fooling Gaia into thinking it was one terrain patch regardless of which tetris shape it was rofl. This merge and split option has always been pointed out on various sites when I try and search for ways to do what I want but I didn't like the sound of it.

 

Just thought I'd share what I've been playing with today: a stamp made from SRTM data of the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in China. For those who don't know, this place was the inspiration for the Hallelujah Mountains in Avatar. While a terrain can't reproduce all of the concave rock features of the original, it's still pretty impressive. If anyone's interested, I can post the the map used.

 

@FargleBargle , How did you get the terrain data? did you use terrain.party or could you explain the steps you used to get the data and turn it into what you have there. Thanks in advanced I have been trying to do this with some other locations but have not had anywhere near such a good looking result as yours.

 

I love it! What did you use for the sky?

 

I tried Terrain Party, but wasn't satisfied with the resolution. I finally found a direct source for USGS 1 Arc-Second data here: http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

Here's how I got the map data I used:

1. Use either a street address, or Lat/Long coordinates to locate a data tile
2. Once you have a location, hit the "Data Sets" button
3. Pick Digital Elevation > SRTM > SRTM 1 Arc-Second Global, then hit the "Results" button
4. Click the thumbnail image, then the image in the pop-up window
5. Save the large image, and import it into Unity
6. Drop it onto Gaia's Scanner to generate a stamp

Of course it also took a bit of research to find the latitude and longitude of the area I wanted (in this case 29.345N, and 110.437E). Each tile represents one degree of latitude and longitude, so mine was from 29 to 30 North, and from 100 to 111 East. When entering Lat/Long data on this site, use positive numbers for North latitudes, negative for South, positive for East longitudes, and negative for West. That's about it.

The skybox came from: https://cgi.tutsplus.com/articles/freebie-8-awesome-ocean-hdris--cg-5684.

 

Ahhh nice, how did you get it to scale so wonderfully in unity? once I throw it in the scanner it shows a very squashed scan of the data. Did you trim your image in an image editor? If so how did you trim it so you could scale it correctly in unity. Of course by correctly I mean roughly, rather then how squished it makes it by default. Thanks.

 

I've found that terrain.party works best with US locations. Other places around the world, terrain.party just doesn't have access to higher resolutions needed to make a good scan for whatever reason. I'm wondering if maybe there are some legal issues with them using the SRTM data sets or something.

Great info @FargleBargle!

I'm not sure how Fargle did his, but I usually try to keep my original areas that I convert to stamps no larger than a 12km square original area. With terrain.party scans, I try to keep them at the minimum 8km square original which stamps nice in a 2k square Unity terrain tile. At least I think it does.

 

Yeah I checked it out. As it is now, if you set rotation to 90 (or anything I'm guessing) it will be overridden by the align to terrain checkbox. It doesn't seem like it's possible to do both (align to terrain and offset by for example 90 around X axis.)

 

With the method Fargle mentioned the image you get is an entire 1 degree worth of data, that is roughly 111km!
Or course I don't want all that data only a small portion. So I will try calculate how many pixels roughly 8km is and see if cutting that out and stamping looks ok. Thanks for the info.

 

This question breaks down to two things: horizontal scale and vertical scale. I used the downloaded image "as is" when making the stamp. The horizontal scale seen in Unity is a cheat, since the stamp should actually be about 111 km (69 miles) on a side. I've used it on a terrain that's only 2048 meters square, so it's over 50 times smaller than the real world. I then reduced the vertical scale when stamping, using Gaia's Height setting, to make it work best in my scene. It's also a good idea to add some smoothing to the stamp, as the results can be a bit too rough, not to mention hard on performance otherwise. I have no idea what the proper height should be, probably thousands of meters instead of hundreds, so I just went with what looked best. While the terrain may vaguely resemble the original landscape, it's nowhere close to being realistic. To make it realistic you'd need something like a 64 x 64 array of 1km tiles, complete with mesh overlays to get the shapes of some of the rock towers right, since many have horizontal indentations that a terrain can't show. Hope that doesn't disappoint you too much.

@Shawn67: I hope there are no legal issues. I was actually surprised to find a site where I didn't need to pay for this data. Since it's the USGS though, and was obtained using American tax dollars, maybe they aren't allowed to sell it. They may still have usage restrictions though. Since I'm just playing around at the moment, I'm not too worried, but anyone who wants to use this data in a commercial project should definitely read their terms of use first.

 

I tried this with my house address in London but it looked like a bunch of mountains and there is no way we are that much above sea level with the Thames Estuary and multiple lakes in a 10 mile radius rofl. So as you surmised it could well be US coverage is the best. I'll try on a US address I know well to see how that ends up like.

Edit:
Ah, after importing as a stamp it did seem a might be more reasonable, being more flat than mountainous, but then I did put it in the base group rather than mountains.

This is what my local area would have possibly looked like pre 1850 before they added the main railway line and the thousands of houses in the hundreds of streets. That fact that this was all a forest at one time it is quite believable.




Edit 2:
Read your later posts and realised that each image is 111km d'oh, Will see what happens when I scale the stamp out by 50 to get a 2km section. There is a big hill nearly 6km away from my address so it should have a significant bump somewhere on the terrain.

Edit 3:
Just realised ( used the overlay tool ) that the image I had was for the south essex, north kent, thames area of England. My area is just a small dot in there somewhere rofl. Will have images shortly once I have got it stamped up and prettified. The second screenshot shows how Gaia interpreted it with 20x5x20 scale and a tweak to the sea level to 41 rather than 50. The view is from Kent looking towards Essex across the Thames Estuary, not accurate but for an auto gen it isn't bad.

 

Yes, this is currently a limitation when using satellite data. At 111km, each pixel of a 3600x3600 image represents 30 meters, which could be larger than your whole house. To get accurate data at smaller scales, you might want to look at using a drone: https://dronemapper.com/ or https://www.sensefly.com/applications/gis.html
Could get expensive though, so maybe this instead: http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/making-digital-elevations

 

Yep - the best resolution I have found is with US based sites. To be honest, i find it pretty mind blowing that we can just grab and use the real world at all!

 

I'm wondering if a terrain program could be made that is 'description driven'..
Randomly generated worlds that are built on keywords.

"Computer, generate an infinite desert world. Semi-mountainous with large flat areas. Cacti, sand and desert flowering fauna, tumble-weeds etc. Place a village at co-ordinates 5301,720,3953 on a plateau. Make the village futuristic."
or..
"Computer, generate an infinite forest world. Deciduous trees, with some evergreen shrubbery. Lakes with beaches and rivers entering them. Waterfalls, caves and some mountainous areas covered in pines. A temple to the local Earth Spirits at coordinates 5101,420,3853 built on a flat area 300 metres x 300 metres."

 

Yep - this is what I call "declarative procedural generation" - and is a real interest of mine. I have some ideas on this, but they are probably beyond the scope of Gaia

 

Sounds like your next project after Gena. Maybe another companion package that works with Gaia.

 

Well now you're just getting all Star Trek Holodeck on us.

... and if you look under "About" on any future Holodeck program, you'll probably see an entry saying "Parts of this program are based on the work of Adam Goodrich".

 

Yes and I guess with VR we are getting that step closer to a holodeck.

I'm glad it has a name. The trick would be to let the computer do all of the work (except for the programming of course). Have it recognise what the Player requires through key phrase and key words, like...
island,
infinite,
forest,
Caves,
tunnels,
Place a village
at coordinates
mountains
swamp
etc.
The program could come with a dictionary of recognisable phrases and keywords or it could be clever enough (like google search) to just know what you mean by your inferences. It could even make suggestions. "Would you like snow on those mountains? Suggestions would need to be limited though, to three maximum or the world would never get built.

 

Just curious if its possible to use only certain libraries of textures, trees, grasses in the scene wizard? I have a set terrain size, specs I have to use all the time for starting out from scratch each time. Is it possible to make that the basic template.

 

Yep that is largely what Gaia is all about. You set up your library of resources and spawners and then apply them to any terrain.

Gaia is a terrain creation and content generation automation system that just happens to come with a bunch of cool content

 

@AdamGoodrich I'm sorry to bother you, but I really need help with this. It doesn't seem to be an issue with resources. Both terrain tiles have the same resources in the same places, but the texture spawner just refuses to spawn textures.


EDIT:- I think I've worked out the problem. So no worries!

If anyone else is struggling, I think the problem I was having was because the terrain tiles were too close to each other. I just moved the inactive one away from the one I was attempting to texture and things seemed to work.

I had assumed the texture spawner would only pay attention to the one active terrain tile, but it seems the location of the terrain tile is important too.

 

Just hit "Fit to terrain" - the spawner will move itself to where it needs to be. Same thing works for stampers as well.

 

This question isn't specifically about GAIA but I thought some one here might be able to help. It is about building a scene

I have used GAIA to make a large terrain 8k x 8k. It has been stamped, textured and all objects placed. Trees, Villages etc.

I also removed the default sky and water and added Tenkoku for lighting and Suimono for the water. The scene looks great.

when I try to build this scene however (with it as the only scene in the build and it never finishes building. Each step in the build has over 2000 jobs and after 6 or so hours I am still looking at
"building scene 0: TownFarmTest (7/11 Light Transport | 770 jobs)"

I have has no issues in the past with building other scenes but this one is not getting anywhere and was hoping some one here could help point me in the right direction.

Also @AdamGoodrich amazing work, this has become my most highly recommended asset to all my friends and colleagues.

 

This is caused by the lightmapper trying to bake the lighting. Try going to Window > Lighting, and un-checking Auto.

 

Ok wow thanks alot. I just did this and it took build time from still going at 6 hours to finishing within 30 seconds.
Thanks for all your help Fargle now that I have done that I have successfully got my real world terrain data looking nice from an 8k x 8k cut out of the 111km image I obtained through your steps. Probably a little height tweaking but is very nice.

 

I like share something I have been working since yesterday ...
I am approaching the road / river generation in Gaia ( more general with terrain )
So, what I did is to allow the creation according the heightmap of your terrain going trough a smooth path ..
You have just to put your POI ar ground level, it does not mind what is between them ...and let's go ... it works either in edit mode that in runtime mode ..it works with multi tiles terrain as well. The first good result I got motivates myself ...I am wondering if someone has approached the same problem ...I do not want to reinvent the wheel ...

So, below I just put the two POI to connect with a road ...there is a small mountain ( or a big hill ) in the middle .. my setting is max slope 30% ..



Press run .. and "voilà le jeux sont fait"... I can travel from WP(0000) to WP(0001) going trought my smooth road .. and heightmao of the terrain is adapted trought the path ..

 

Out of curiosity, are you using an asset to generate your track for the road or is that your own custom script? Looks great!

 

Track is created by my scripts.
Only for road I use an asset. And Gaia for terrain..... of course
My focus is only on procedural path creation and even on procedural city map.

 

Very cool. It could easily adapt to a dirt path etc for old fantasy games that haven't progressed to asphalt roads to speed their journey up, but I suppose it could be upgraded over time rofl.

 

WOW!

Gaia has been on the asset store for just over 1 year - it seems like so much longer - and today Gaia achieved the massive milestone of 500 reviews, with an average rating of 5 stars!

Want to send a big thanks to all of the community for your support. I will be sending the love back soon with multi-tile and an update to the lighting and post fx.

I would also like to say thanks to my 500th reviewer - you know who you are

 

Rofl, I'll make it 501+ once I've played with it a while longer Having fun with islands at the moment. Trying to work out terrain ideas that can be placed together and make sense .... Here's my attempt at the first two in maybe an archipelago. I had to do a normal screenshot due to the screenshotter not working with more than one terrain active

Unfortunately I need to find out a way to hide the terrain square from showing throught, but that could be because I had to make the camera's far view longer so that the sea was visible further out rather than tons of open space haha.



Rearramged the islands a bit so that the terrain bases were not so obvious ... in essence I positioned them side to side etc. Here is a view from my 3rd island in the group. All are on 2048 terrain tiles spaced approximately 2km apart but had to put camera far view to 8096 to see the islands properly, otherwise you see the reflection and not the island rofl.



And now island 4 to fit the 4 island block and a shot of all 4 from the dev screen.