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

I understand the frustration. I sometimes miss responding to questions from nothing other than life events or volume / channel of comment. Its never intentional. I try to respond to every question - and pride myself on having responded to every review on every product I have ever released. I guess this many pages of conversation says something about the product. In fact 592,000+ views on this forum is a bit mind boggling and I still pinch myself. Gaia was just meant to be about sharing some cool stuff that I love doing with the community. As things have developed this is now how I pay my mortgage and my kids schooling and the day to day bills.

 

Been playing with HTC Vive VR and Gaia... makes me think

 

Okay thank you, I will try this out.

What I've done now is, that I exported all my scripts and saved these somewhere else.
I deleted they from the Assets folder in Unity and started working with Gaia, so when my work is finished I can import my scripts back again, but that only can be a temporary solution.

Edit: I changed target platform, but this won't help. Also I must delete the Gaia, sript in Aqaus to make it work.

 

Gday Adam, I picked up a copy of Gaia last week to play with on my new PC, since getting it I have been playing with it every spare moment - picking up new assets like Tenkoku, AI spawners etc - I have to slow down before I blow all my budget in one go - and I am still just learning.

Building beautiful worlds for use with a system like HTC Vive has been one of my my main reasons for getting the new PC and Gaia (still saving for the Vive) would love to hear your experiences with using the HTC Vive and Gaia - so when you said - 'makes me think' - what were you thinking??

 

Also, there are some weird performance problems when spawning things like grass. For example, when my cursor is on unity window, the grass spawning is not that fast, but if I move my mouse to the top of the screen or on to the taskbar, the spawning progress moves much faster. I also use synergy, so once I move my mouse of the windows PC, the spawning happens faster as well.

The same happens on MacOS, I have to move my mouse cursor to the top of the screen in order to make the spawning fast.

Also, ctrl+g seems to be a new unity shortcut and it groups the last selected object. On mac, cmd+g works fine.

 

How to add more speedtrees? Hello, I purchased a few Speedtree Desktop Trees. How can I add them to Gaia? When I add on spawn tree I only can choose between the free speedtree from Gaia?!?

 

Thanks Adam, that list will be really useful. I've spent most of this year developing my own skills in Maya and Blender to pass on to the students. I've only just started developing skills in Unity and I have to say it's quite a steep learning curve and there is an almost overwhelming array of free and cheap assets in the store.

I've been busy the last couple of years getting more programming units embedded into the curriculum and while it has been quite successful, I'd like the students to have more of a WYSIWYG or drag and drop approach to Unity so that they can get into games developing much quicker than if they had to learn C# first. We also have invested in VR KIT too so I'd like them to get into basic development for that platform too.

As soon as I discovered your Gaia and Gena assets and also your recommendations for water, lighting and buildings I knew that was going to really speed up the process for students to get something physical built quickly. I have struggled a bit to get everything to play nicely together such as Tenkoku, suimono, 3D forge exteriors with Gaia and Gena. You mentioned each of the 3rd party assets casually in your tutorials on Youtube for Gaia and Gena, but it would be nice to see how you install and setup each of these for Gaia specifically.

I found that with Tenkoku in particular I was getting a really ugly reflection at the bottom of the character camera which I could only get rid of by turning off fog or enabling HDI after turning of Quality|Anti aliasing.

 

Hey there,

I just bought Gaia and I have a few (newb) questions.

One:I am trying to make a larger session manager (i guess).. In the image included, I resized the stamper, but the terrain does not increase size as well. It stays the size of the white box. How do I increase the size of the white box? I followed your tutorial on bringing in real life topography maps and I am trying to resize the map so it will be similar to the same size, if that makes sense.

https://postimg.org/image/qzvk4w4dv/

Two: So I was looking at Gena as well, and what are the main differences between the two programs? Since they are made by the same gent I am guessing they are compatible... but just how do the two programs integrate with each other.

I am sure I will have more as time goes on, thank you so much for your time.

 

I will do a tutorial on some of this to make things a little easier. Might do one on optimisation and setting up speedtree as well.

You need to create the new terrain at the size you want to use. This is done via the Terrain Size setting in GaiaDefaults file, which is in your Gaia/Data directory.

There is a great little information page on the impact of these settings here : http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Terrain_tutorial.

Gaia does everything. It is also great for automating things and applying them to either all of the terrain of to specific biomes.

GeNa is a very specialised spawning tool only and does not do terrain or texturing, however it gives you laser precision on everything else, and a bunch more spawning / procedural capability. It can do things like rock walls, and gravity, and can also spawn on meshes. It also has a spawning optimisation system that automatically places light probes, and automatically optimises the things it places into your scene so that your scene runs faster and is better lit. You have precise control over things like structure placement and rotation and it can even place fences.

In my own workflow, I use Gaia for terrain and texturing and Gena for everything else.

 

Thank you so very much for the reply and the answers. I will check out that tutorial right now.

 

How to remove an individual tree?

Sorry if this has been answered already. I normally search a thread before asking a question, but at 145 pages...

Anyway, I just added my trees using the Clustered Tree Spawner. This works fine for the most part, but there are a few trees that are in the way that I need to remove, but I can't figure out how to do this. There doesn't seem to be a way to select an individual tree. Is it possible?

 

Yep. The terrain itself has great tools for this.

Click on the terrain. Go to its settings in the inspector. Select any tree, then shrink the paint brush down. Then shift click to delete trees where the paint brush is.

 

It's kinda cool that Gaia has become such a great "go-to" terrain asset that people forget about the built in tools that come with Unity. You need to keep reminding yourself you have more tools in the toolbox, even if you rarely ever use them. .

 

Dear Adam,
Please consider the value of this "not particularly difficult to do" thing for us! This could allow us to do many many things with a simple component to check that. I don't know how people do without it? Other solutions are very complicated.
I suppose you are very busy with all your other tools for Unity but Gaia deserves it!
Thanks in advance.

 

Hey there,

So I went to the Terrain Tutorial and it mentions Resolution Settings. And I found the part talking about what the settings mean:

• 1025px heightmap resolution: 1px = 0.98m x 0.98m

But it does not mention how to change them that I saw.

So I found the GaiaDefaults and GaiaDefaults.asset files... but when I open them in notepad to look for the Terrain Size setting.. it is just a bunch of ASCII characters.

I obviously missed something, but what? Thanks again for your insight into this.

 

Hi Adam and Curator, I will share some of my Oculus Rift findings here soon (if all works out this weekend or the next). Since my efforts in the past two months revolve around terrain, unsurprisingly Gaia features heavily in it. It's the resulting terrain which poses some challenges for VR and some of the other assets I have cannot be used without making some quality related decisions and/or change default settings. Some assets really add value for VR when combined with Gaia terrain making (hint: MegaSplat). Watch this space .

 

You don't open them up in a text editor. Its for editing within unity. The files will show as objects in the folder within unity. Similar to game objects you can select them to adjust the settings.

 

Hi,
with Gaia 2.0 on the way, I would like to know, if there will be a free upgrade to 2.0?

 

Okay, for someone who has never done this before, could you please walk me through it?

Do i click on the stamper? There are settings in the inspector tab, but when I manipulate those, it does not change the size of the actual terrain.

 

That's awesome Adam. Much congrats good sir. Tis what's it's all about.

 

This tutorial page for Gaia should show you what you can do to adjust the terrain before you start stamping..

http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/how-to-change-the-settings-for-terrains/

The other tutorials are well worth watching or reading if you have just started out. I sometimes come back to refresh my memory.

 

I believe this was his last comment on the subject

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/g...d-scene-creation.327342/page-144#post-2936500

 

I just started using Gaia again after a long time away. I have a few questions.

First, is there a button or something somewhere for toggling on/off off all Gaia managers and spawners? I don't want to remove Gaia from the project yet as I am probably going to go back and adjust things and re-spawn. But when I run on my target hardware I'd like to have it all turned off so nothing interferes with performance during runtime. I've been going in and disabling all the various components, but it's a pain to go back and forth like that.

Second, I wondering why the object spawner puts the spawned objects as children of the spawner instead of under the Gaia Environment? The reason I ask is because it's the only thing in the Gaia hierarchy that needs to remain on when I turn off everything else for runtime testing. If it was under Gaia Environment then all I'd have to do is simply deactivate and reactivate the Gaia hierarchy when I want to go back and forth between design mode and target testing.

Third, I noticed that the sample farm house spawns all have box colliders on them, which blocks characters from even approaching the doors. I just wondered why they were done that way because they aren't practical for game use with that setup.

 

1. Have you thought about having a separate scene set up for gaia development purposes then switch to another scene for the rest ?

2. I queried this as well several months back as I lost several maps worth of objects before I realised. I now make sure that I drag down the spawners onto the terrain its based on, but it gets fiddly sometimes as you have to make sure it all aligns. I think Adam said he would look into it, but really can't recall the exact phrasing.

3. The colliders are used to ensure that nothing else spawns there, that is why the colliders are grouped separately so that they can be removed once you are finished with setting up the terrain.

I'm sure Adam will be able to add anything else or point out where I have misunderstood myself

 

No. Not sure how this could work if I want to go back and forth before makiing things final.

Yeah, I thought about dragging them down, but was thinking it would break the connection to the spawner. Now that I re-think it, maybe it would be fine. I'll have to look at that.

I see the separate grouped colliders, but these are not separate, but attached to the spawned objects themselves. I'll double check that though.

 

Thank you Xrystal. I read nearly the whole thread, but I must have I missed this. It's hard to read all the posts...

 

Not sure about mid design, but once you have finished with designing it, drag down the objects with the terrain so you can put them as part of that terrain game object / prefab etc for use in the game project.

Hmm, maybe I was thinking about the trees having colliders.

 

Has anyone tried integrating AltTrees with Gaia?

 

Yep. Click on the defaults file in Unity and the settings will appear in the inspector. Change them in the inspector.

Yes.

Please take some time to check the video's out here : http://www.procedural-worlds.com/gaia/tutorials/.

They sit in a hierarchy. Enable or disable them.

Yeah. I did this differently and better in Gena. I will modify this behavior in Gaia 2.0.

I think I only add them if they don't already exist. There is also an option to disable adding colliders during spawn from memory as well.

I will be exploring creating each terrain tile in a separate scene for Gaia 2.0. This will then allow the use of the capability inherently created in Unity to support this. Not sure how well it will work, but definitely going to explore it.

Once Gaia 2.0 is out I will again start focusing getting integrations going with other authors. I find the integration system to be very handy.

 

The new multi threaded / gpu compute framework for Gaia 2.0 is now complete.

One of the cooler features is the ability to make any class multi threaded just by implementing an interface. Like it so much am considering releasing it as a whole new asset. Getting Gaia 2.0 out first tho.

You can see the new system stepping through and doing its thing in the debug info below. This is a 2k x 2k terrain stamped in just 32 milliseconds.

Why it is useful to support both multi-threading and GPU compute is because you get the best of all worlds. Multi threading enables you to use all the cores on your computer to do the maths and it works on all platforms. And GPU compute takes advantage of the parallel computing power of your of GPU if your platform supports it.

 

Is GPU compute going to be optional? The reason I ask is because TC2 has GPU compute and it doesn't work in the editor for me when I am developing for the Wii U. I can only get it to work in a separate project in Windows mode.

 

Yes - that's why I developed the multi threaded framework as well.

 

That's what I thought. Thanks for confirming. I definitely like.

 

It may have changed in recent updates but I am sure I read somewhere that Unity's ComputeShaders ( I assume thats what is meant by GPU Compute ) only work on devices that have DirectX 11 or 12 and an OpenGL version that Unity doesn't support yet.

Have you been able to test it on an OpenGL only environment Adam, while you're playing about with them ?

 

This may be by design, but I thought I'd ask. With the default Coverage GameObject Spawner, the buildings in the farm are spawning buried deep in the ground. The door is above ground, but the stairs leading up to it are all underground.

 

Hopefully they will correct me if I am wrong but I believe the creator of the objects deliberately did this so that the building is useable whether it is spawned slightly below ground or above it. If it spawns below the stairs are minimal or non existent and if it doesn't there are stairs to climb to get to the door. I'm sure I read a similar explanation elsewhere.

 

Has to be this, because if you watch closely you can see, that there are no further colliders below the house. So if the stairs would spawn on the ground, the house would float in the air.

 

Not quite sure what you are saying here, but it could certainly work with stairs above ground as you can see below when I adjust the building manually. It's not a huge deal, but I just wanted to know if the spawner somehow has a setting to deliberately bury it this way or if it was a bug.



[EDIT]
Actually, I can see now where the awnings would be a problem. Although, it could have some of the stairs visible and still work. But I think I see the reason for burying it. Might be nice to have it not quite so buried though so I could see some of the stairs.

 

Funny, it looked like there was no base to the building but you just activated the stairs.

The pivot shown in editor view is the pivot of the whole prefab? Because if it is, then it is spawned with the pivot on ground level which should be totally normal as it does the same for me.

 

The building prefabs are created that way on purpose(with the base, long stairs and such) so they can be spawned in various situations with slopes.

It's like spawning trees, with part of the models underground so it doesn't float at the surface.

 

Yep, I get it now. Thanks all.

 

Yep. Means you get to leverage your assets in worlds that are not flat as well.

It surprises me that more assets are not created this way. Great work @S4G4N

 

For those of you interested in GeNa, I created this post to show how it is different to Gaia.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/gena-sophisticated-procedural-content-spawner.437566/

 

Adam hey and thank you for Gaya. It helped me quite a bit in my current project. Have a question on future functionality, specific on texturing. Do you have any plans on taking a totally different approach to texturing the terrain ? Moving away from spawner visualization with dots/spheres into a texture representation updating real time, with more options controlling the mixing (similar to TC2) ?

 

Possibly. I don't use TC2, so I can't comment.

The current texturing approach is very powerful and it just works. I also have other ideas I want to explore. If you have suggestions on what you would like to see then I am open to it.

I also plan to change the visualisation approach and do it in a shader - it will be faster - but one step at a time.

First nut I am cracking is multi tile terrain - which fyi is now enabled in Gaia 2.0.

 

Hi Adam and all,

While this question is somewhat not related to Gaia, I thought Id ask in regards to users and their SpeedTrees. Ive seen so many screenshots in this forum, and the trees look great. How are people achieving this? My trees look so low quality at a distance or close for that matter, lack any real sharpness, and just dont look the same.(desktop version of ST)

The trees Ive seen in the forum, seem to be darker at a distance, minimal loss in leaf texture ect. Any pointers? So far I have all my trees set to LOD1 and have tried several Post effects, and well they look so out of place.

 

I don't use TC2 either. Just watched his newest video on building a terrain from scratch. The main problem for me with the current texturing process is that its hard to judge where a certain texture will be as well as how will it mix with others in the end and spawning (to see the final result) takes time.

"I also plan to change the visualisation approach and do it in a shader - it will be faster - but one step at a time."

Maybe this will totally negate my issue.

 

Yep it will

 

There are a bunch of things at play here. There is plenty of scope to control how the SpeedTrees work in your environment. You need to dig into their settings.

Additionally, I rarely show anything off without lighting and PostFX - and this plays a significant part on how nice the scene looks.

A couple of quick pointers:

* Get a nice 3rd party lighting asset from the store - they will make a significant difference
* Get a nice environmental haze asset from the store as well if your lighting system doesnt have one - Deep Sky Haze is my current favourite.
* Get hold of the free experimental Unity Post Processing stack here and work out how to set it up in your scene - the difference is remarkable: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/PostProcessing
* Make sure you take the time to put light probes and bake your scene. The real time GI doesn't really kick in until this is done and it really does makes a big difference. FYI GeNa does this for you automatically. I may also add the Gena optimisation system to Gaia 2.0 - will see how i go.

In Gaia 2.0 I will be improving the free lighting that comes with Gaia, and also providing a direct integration with the new Unity Post Processing. I have a number of configurations I use that make a massive difference.

Then study up on lighting Unity - the better you get your lighting the better your scenes will look.

 

Such a change would be great.