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

Y-E-S

 

I imagine Adam will be fine without his $44 and the inevitable 1-star review...

 

I've got a question. I doubled my terrain size, and when I go to generate a random terrain it starts stamping in the top left corner from the original terrain size, not in the middle of the new terrain. Can you help?

 

Okay, to lift the confusion, I asked if there is random tree rotation in Gaia, I can't recall alleging it did not, since I would not know.
Then I was talking about Unity and the terrain editor,
anyway, I looked into it and found that in later versions there is a random tree rotation for speed-tree but not for the tree creator trees.
Have you noticed this?
The reason I was asking was to help me decide if Gaia was the right tool for me to purchase for my project, since this is a detail that matters to me and my clients.
So can you tell me if Gaia is able to randomly rotate any kind of tree?

Thanks.

 

Just start the new session from scratch on a new and larger terrain - it should be fine.

From Gaia's perspective all terrain trees are the same and Gaia spawns them all with random rotation via the API i showed you.

It is quite possible that there is a bug in Unity that causes Unity trees not to rotate. They really seem to have abandoned them with Unity 5.

The work around - not ideal - is to spawn the Unity trees as prefabs instead. Have not tried myself - i tend to be exclusively SpeedTree as i think they are much nicer.

I will test it out and see if i can replicate it. If i can then I will talk to Unity about it.

 

Interesting update on my issue...most of the assets now show the name, but the Game Object Prototypes are still showing a GUID instead of their name:

 

Unfortunately there is not much i can do about this. The issue as previously commented is to do with serilization, as is the fix.

 

This is probably too simple to work....but....this happened randomly in my project also. I just reimported gaia, reloaded my scene, and it was back to being fine. Maybe I just got lucky.

 

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. That makes sense. Now I get it.

Adam, you should probably put that information front and center in the product description. Like Steven said, I was confused.

 

There is a little section in the description that talks about compatibility. Unity terrain in - unity terrain out. Same thing i guess but using slightly different words.

Glad its sorted now.

 

Might be an idea to delete Gaia before re-importing. The resource files wont have changed despite serialization being different, and chances are Unity may not detect this as a difference requiring an update.

 

Anyone working with Mesh for Terrain instead of Unity Terrain?
What are you using to convert from Unity5 Terrain to Mesh? Just saw this asset for this purpose:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/47276

I am thinking of using meshes in the future to be able to control trees and grasses in the future better. But anyway I would build a unity terrain using Gaia for stamping to have a starting point for my mesh and after that GENA would populate the Mesh for me.

Cheers
Ronny

 

Hi Adam or anyone else that can help,

I purchased the product last night and I am trying to create "provinces" using your terrain. Similar to this (unfortunately its a WIP).

An alternative I found from this link on the 4th post, mentions having the terrain's texture in photoshop so I can colourise it to display different provinces and their borders on your terrain.

Can you please tell me how I can get the terrains texture? Or even suggest a different alternative if thinking is headed in the wrong direction?

EDIT: Is that the export splatmap utility? The output is a black and white image. Is it meant to be that colour?

Thank you

 

Gaia does this - under utilities. You can also export your splatmaps.

 

Thanks. I'm a little wary of "soon"s as it's a pretty common response to just about everyone who asks for "feature x" for a software package. Tiling has been on the roadmap since as long as I can remember. Do you have a rough ETA?

 

I am working on it now. Can't be much more specific than that.

It's a substantial amount of work to support across the product as Gaia is a deep product when you add all the utilities, extensions, and sessioning systems in, and I am also introducing a bunch of new stuff that needs time to mature.

It will be ready sooner rather than later hopefully, but as those who have been with me since the start know, it won't be released until its at a quality and capability level that I am happy with.

 

Good progress today... time to generate a 2k x 2k terrain using the new compute shaders... 1 ms to compute (yes that's one one-thousandth of a second!!), 30ms to apply (that time is essentially all unity terrain overhead)... woo.... !!!

 

And updating on this, when applying a stamp, the time increased to 13ms (most of this to do with moving data in memory). Very happy with the performance boost!

 

I'm actually just starting to use meshes for terrain myself and I have recently purchased the tool you linked to. I'm no expert with it yet, but so far it works great.

 

Hey- I am having problems with the scanner.

I save the image file as a 1024X1024 16-bit grayscale RAW in photoshop, and the scanner will not recognize it. Nether will the scanner accept JPGs, TIFFs, BMPs, or anything else I try.

I have also tried saving as RGB, 8 bit, etc- nothing helps.

I was really wanting to be able to bring in my own texture maps.

Any suggestions?

[EDIT] Disregard. I found out that I have to import the textures into terrain, before they work with the scanner.

 

If you want to send a private message I will be happy to walk you through it via Skype. Glad your issue is sorted any way. This has worked well for over a year, so I am curious as to why you are having problems with it.

 

Hi @AdamGoodrich - I purchased Gaia awhile back and am just now using it to create something new. I watched many of your videos a couple months ago and they were very helpful for learning Gaia. I have a question which has been asked before about how to form nice beaches when creating a large island. I did a search but had trouble finding any definitive answers. Do you have recommendations on how to create a beach area around the island? I don't actually want beach areas everywhere, but in many spots I want a nice beach going into the water more gradually. I saw a reference to a "beach nibbler", but not sure if this is an actual tool

 

Best way to make beaches is to get a stamp, set its height to be quite small so that its mostly flat, and then set stamp operation type to Lower Height. The other thing you want to do is set the distance mask so that left hand side is 1, and right hands side is 0. Then move the stamp to where you want to create the beach and start stamping. Remember you are subtracting height, so you will need to lower the stamp under the terrain so that it can subtract the height, and with the settings I have given you, the center of the stamp will be the place where the greatest effect will be seen.

If you want to get more interesting variation then you could use an image based area mask instead of an image mask, and drop one of the mountain stamp preview images onto it.

The stamper is a very powerful tool once you take a little time to explore it. There are three videos on stamping here: http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/.

 

how to create a terrain 30 km x 30 km ?

 

The settings that control terrain size are in your gaia defaults file. Please take a look at the documentation to get a sense of how they influence the terrain that is created.

30km is a very large environment, and larger than I would recommend with Unity in a single tile. Gaia will still work, but because of the large sizes everything will take a bunch of time to generate, so you will need to be a little patient.

Next version of Gaia will be multi tile enabled, and use GPU based compute to speed things up. I have already seen improvements of approximately 400x with the progress I have made so far.

 

Any rough period of time when we're going to have the multi-tile support? I'd certainly pay extra for it

But in my opinion this tile thingy would be absolutely useless if the unity team would have done that tiling internal, just like unreal out there, where you can tell the terrain's division in chunks and the resolution of each chunk etc... And that's not incredible technology it's quite old and standard.

Thought at doing that myself but in that case Gaia would not work since it's designed for the Unity terrains ( . So however you put this lack of internal terrain chunking is still a huge hole in Unity's functionality.

 

@AdamGoodrich Hey man, I'm having a similar issue @Aerothosis was having. But I didn't see a resolution to it. After populating a 4096 size terrain with the Coverage GameObject Spawner the performance drops off and I get thousands of "group < 0x7fff" errors. Has there been any fix for this?

 

If you are getting errors then something more fundamental is wrong there and if lots of errors are being thrown then it will also severely kill performance - a link to an asset has changed or something. I don't have enough information to offer any insight on the errors.

To get around the issue, just delete that spawner and recreate it from the advanced menu.

The game object spawner will happily spawn lots of villages if you have a large fairly flat terrain and these villages are composed of lots of game objects. Unity is very slow when parenting i.e. the process of making an object a child of another object and I do this to keep it all neat. As soon as you add one more thing, it causes the entire tree to recalculate, and this is unfortunately very slow when spawning thousands of objects.

The quick and dirty work around is just to click on another application outside of Unity when spawning lots of trees / villages. Just click back on Unity every so often. It will run much faster as Unity will not recalculate the tree when it does not have focus.

I spent a bunch of time in Gena finding a range of ways to mitigate this, and by comparison Gena is very fast. I will retro fit them into Gaia in the next release.

Multi tile will come as soon as I can get it out, eta is next few months. To get the sort of performance I want I need to add in multi threading and gpu compute support, and this is a substantial amount of re-work. If you have been following the thread you will probably have noticed that the performance improvements I have been getting have been pretty incredible - think 400x faster or better - and this brings Gaia into the realm of real time / runtime generation!

With respect to pricing, multi tile has always been on the roadmap, so that will be free, as will the performance improvements offered via multi threading. I will probably move the gpu compute aspect into a separate advanced product that people can then upgrade to if they want. I will also be exploring real time / run time generation in the gpu compute version.

 

Nice little tutorial so far but did you get any further with it? I just followed the whole thing through but I can't go any further because part 2 hasn't arrive yet Could you tell me the rest of the process you used to make the 32 Karrot terrain?

 

@AdamGoodrich Aight, I think I found the error. The issue seems to start with Speedtree. Regenerating the Speedtrees materials seems to fix it and it loads everything A LOT faster. It no longer takes 5-10 minutes to run the coverage tree and gameobject spawners but they finish in just a few seconds.

Guess it helps to read the entire quick start guide

 

I am guessing you need to build up the terrain before applying the beach element - because the lower terrain setting of course won't work if it is already at the minimum. I couldn't get these steps to work until I had raised the terrain height somewhat. I'll have to play with it some more to see how to do this

 

Yeah good point - sometimes I assume too much - i assumed that the beach would be carved out of a pre-existing environment - hard to carve a beach out of a flat terrain at height zero

As a general point, imho, flat terrains are pretty boring, and this is compounded by the lack of texture variation that Unity gives you.

As a way of addressing this, you can still have "mostly flat" terrains. To do this take a hills stamp with some variation in it and sets its height to say 0.5 or 1 (look at the preview to see what works for you), and then stamp it.

This provides a subtle variation that then makes your environment look more interesting. This plays out in the subtle texture variations that are introduced by changes in height and slope, and also in subtle lighting variation at different times of day.

 

Well- to be truthful, it might have been my older computer. I just finished upgrading to a newer machine, and it performs MUCH better with Unity/Gaia.

Thanks again for producing these assets. Each time I complete a full C# lesson, I reward myself with building a new world in Gaia.

 

Hi Adam,

Thank you for the Gaia, I was playing with it and it looks very cool!
Can I ask you how or what is the best way to model terrain from real life? with roads and pathways!
Please see attached images of the mountain I would like to model.
I can extract a base form/shape from SketchUp or WorldComposer, but I don't know how to add roads, textures in the right locations, per photo?
I want to make it as close as possible to real one.

Thank you

 

Here is a video on how to import real world terrain with Gaia : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/import-real-world-terrain/

Importing roads and pathways from the real world is beyond the scope of Gaia, but you can do things like masking to modify the terrain in specific areas. There are also some very good 3rd party roads tools you can use from the asset store.

With the scanning system, you can take other structures and create stamps, which can then be used by the Gaia stamping system. Things that you can scan include meshes, terrains, images, windows 32 bit raw files, and World Machine .r16 files.

 

Hi Adam,

First of all, thank you for this fantastic product!

I have a rather small question that I'm not able to find an answer for anywhere. When I create a new scene in Unity and press the "Show session Manager"-button in the GAIA-window. The game object "Session manager" Is empty.

I tried to reimport GAIA, delete everything and reimport it again but the same thing happens.

I hope this is some kind of bug or is this license i bought just for one scene?? In the description it says "This extension requires one license per seat" but I do not really know what the definition of a "seat" is.

Please help me out here.

Thanks a bunch!

 

Definitely something going wrong there. The one license per seat requirement means only the computer you are using for this tool should have it. While on that computer you can use it for as many projects and scenes as you like.

I'm just going to run through the process again at my end to see what you should see as it might simply be misunderstanding on how it works. In which case the tutorial videos will be a blast Of course Adam may respond before I do due to the time frame.

Edit:

You should definitely see something there. Here is my screen when I first Show the Manager after creating a brand new scene. If this is a project you have used before for Gaia the manager may still be where you last put it.

And then there are the set of game objects including the session manager created after pressing that first button in the Gaia Manager.

If you select Show session manager when the session manager isn't selected it will select it. Otherwise it will ignore the action as you are already selecting it.

If this doesn't answer your question, maybe a screen shot or two of what you are seeing to see if we can spot something out of the ordinary.

 

The http://www.procedural-worlds.com/ website seems be stopped: "Error 403 - This web app is stopped."

 

same here.
hopefully Adam will check in today and look into it.

 

Yeah sorry about the web site - very tedious. I have sent a support request to see why Microsoft have disabled the account it is connected to. In the mean time - you can access all of the tutorial videos for all my products at : https://www.youtube.com/user/btektube/playlists

Also, Gaia, GeNa and Pegasus are on sale at the moment for the Global Game Jam.



The pricing is correct for GeNa and Pegasus, however there is a bug with the asset store that stops me from reducing the price of Gaia, so Gaia is not reduced properly. If anyone purchases Gaia between 20th January and 24th January, and can send me the documentation to prove it, I will refund the difference for them to their PayPal account!

Gaia - $30, normally $44.99
GeNa - $30, normally $44.99
Pegasus - $17, normally $25

Enjoy!

 

Some of you may have noticed that the procedural worlds web site was down - its back up again now

If your looking for tutorials or other information then head on over!

http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/
http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gena/tutorials/
http://www.procedural-worlds.com/pegasus/tutorials/

 

Hi Adam,

Really cool products you have. I'm not a Unity crack (yet), but for a project, I need it.

I do have a few questions on Gaia after watching the product page and youtube videos - I hope you have not heard a them 1000 times before..

- If Gaia has placed it's vegetation .. is it possible to go in an manually erase some plants/grass and add new ones via a brush? Respectively is it possible to manually place some instances and have the 'rest' be filled procedurally?
- On a 5x5km terrain, if I need some dense forest partly - would you go 'full 3d' with e.g. speedtrees or start working with 'forest billboards'?
- I suppose Gaia builds upon Unity's native terrain system - can you mention a few pros / cons of that system, regarding handling LOTS of instances, e.g. for grass?

Hope to get an answer!

Huge thanks,
matt

 

Yes & Yes

Depends on your performance requirements. Speedtrees will billboard automatically based on how you configure them. In Unity 5.5 if you set them up properly they will also use gpu instancing, which can be a massive performance boost.

Pro's - easy, powerful, xplatform, standard, everything built in, LOD's, no need to use game objects for things like trees. Con's - lack of textures, texture tiling, memory consumption. You don't want your tiles to be too big either.

I am sure there is a lot of other material out there as well on unity terrain. If you choose not to use it then you need to be pretty sure you know what you are doing as you will need to re-engineer all the nuances the terrain system - in the majority of cases this means less performance, less capability and often more memory. For example I would stay well away from voxel based terrain systems in Unity.

 

Thanks for answering. Just to be sure I created a brand new scene, opened the Gaia manger and pressed "show session manager" under the first point in the advanced tab.

What happens then is that it only create two wmpty game objects. One named "Gaia" and one named "Session Manager" but they are empty. No scrips or anything attached, (I tried to manually add the Session Manager-scrip but gets and error saying "The scrips is an editor script"

I attached a picture just to be super clear.

PS I could also add that I'v used Gaia before in another scene and it worked perfect then.

 

Yep this code has been running for over two years without missing a beat, so your issue is in some way environmental.

I notice that the bottom of your screen capture has an error. Take a look in your console window and see whats going on.

You can also drop me a PM and i would be happy to do a skype session to observe whats going on.

 

Hey Adam,

Thanks a lot for all the helpful inputs. Much appreciated!

I'll look into this some more! You may hear again from me. ;-)

Cheers from switzerland,
matt

 

Thank you for your help. I found the issue. I moved the "Scrips"-folder outside the "Editor"-folder and now it works. I found it weird that when I just imported the asset from the assets store the folders in the project manager end up in wrong places. I just assumed that when I re-imported everything from the assets store all the gaia folders should sort correctly and end up in the correct place.

Anyhow, I'm pretty sure that this was some error from my part, as you self said: The code has been running perfectly for 2 years so I guess I messed up somewhere haha.

Thank you again for your quick answers and help, and a very nice product!

 

Adam,

I'm pretty convinced I will go ahead and purchase Gaia and GeNa!

I do have some other questions:
=========================
1] For larger areas, which tree type do you typically use: 'Hero', 'Desktop' or 'Mobile'? If only 'Mobile', pros/cons? [ I need to know which Speedtree packs to purchase. ]
2] For proper color grading / bloom / DoF / atmospherics (e.g. godrays), do Gaia / Gena have specific limitations where you personally would invest in an additional plugin? If so, which?
3] Would you recommend an additional AO solution?

Thanks and have a great day!
matt

 

Hi Matt - if you want the special deal you will need to purchase within the next 24 hours.

Generally desktop is a good option for desktop games.

Gaia is a terrain tool and as such doesn't have them. What Gaia does to is auto configure the free ones that come with Unity. For lighting, godrays and atmospherics Tenkoku is a nice solution, there is also a nice Gaia integration with it so it is a 1 click sort of thing. For post processing the beta stuff from Unity here is amazing : https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/PostProcessing. I will add integration support for that in the next release.

The new unity post fx has one, but I also quite like HBAO. It looks great and performs well.

 

awesome, thanks for the detailed help!!

off to do some shopping now.

matt